


The 20th Century Boy

by solongsun



Category: Dir en grey
Genre: AU, I mean in mine it's 16 so whatever, I suppose it depends on the age of consent in your country, Jrock - Freeform, M/M, Time Travel, but just like barely, hints of underage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-02-20 13:23:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 17
Words: 54,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13147614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solongsun/pseuds/solongsun
Summary: Since early childhood, Kaoru has been using doors to travel backwards and forwards through time: a motion he is sometimes able to control, and sometimes not. At the age of 22, he opens a door to the long-ago autumn of 1996 and finds something he never expected – a man who, decades before Kaoru's birth, seems to know exactly who he is...





	1. Heroes

**Author's Note:**

> It's Dir en grey so literally nobody will read this, but I don't care because I ship Kaoru and Toshiya the hardest.
> 
> Some more relevant notes:  
> 1) The chapter titles are all songs that felt appropriate. I'll try to remember to throw some more details about the song/artist in the end notes, because I promise, they'll all be good songs.  
> 2) The narrative is going to jump back and forwards in time. It might be confusing. It is confusing for me.  
> 3) 'Hints of underage': some VERY forward behaviour from a teenager.  
> 4) If you read this and enjoy it, please drop a comment or two from time to time! It means the absolute world to me and inspires me to write faster, so it's a big win-win.  
> 5) I would by no means at all expect this to be updated as quickly as Maps.

He opens the door and the scene changes.

It's automatic; it's meaner than a blink. Like a reflex – a reflex that only he has – hurling him through time.

The cold stings abruptly at his face, and when he exhales, he breathes out a long plume of white mist. He shivers, not dressed for it; in the time he's just left, it was spring. Spring of 2053.

A great grey sky lies overhead, fat-bellied with snow, and though the ground is bare Kaoru can smell it in the air; the flinty smell of winter. The ground is frozen under his feet, and when he walks, his footsteps ring out around him tinnily.

He is in some kind of a cemetery, but the years on the graves are long ago: 1990, one says, and further up, towards where the newer graves are, 2014. He examines them as he walks, trying to find out exactly when or where he is. The cemetery isn't yet full, and he has yet to find a date more recent than 2014 on one of the monuments, so he supposes it must be loosely around that time.

His heart performs a strange kind of jump in his chest, because 2014 – it must be _his_ time. Toshiya's time.

The thought is such a pure and strong one that Kaoru actually turns around, his hair whipping around his face, as if Toshiya might be hiding behind one of these gravestones.

Stupid, of course; he's completely alone. The depth of the silence – a silence that hasn't been broken in days – should be enough to tell him that.

Just outside of the walls, a grey winter tree stretches its branches jaggedly towards the sky; they look sharp enough to tear a hole in the thick clouds overhead. As if they have, the first tiny snowflake settles on Kaoru's shoulder, melting into his clothes as he shivers and watches it.

He feels like he is the only thing alive for miles. Everything beyond the cemetery walls is fog, and he understands: he isn't supposed to see.

 

There is nothing else to do but move forward, and to wander amongst the graves and read their names and dates. None of them mean anything to him, and when he finds a small caretaker's hut and tries the door, he finds it locked.

All the grass is dead, yellowish and straggly. Every so often he gets a whiff of something smoky and sweet, like incense on the air. His footsteps echo off the tall monuments surrounding him as if somebody else is walking behind him, right on his heels, and he finds himself turning to look over his shoulder more often than he needs to.

In his heart, he's convinced Toshiya is somewhere around. 2014, if it's 2014; Toshiya will be 37, an age Kaoru has never seen him at, and he will be out there somewhere – his life progressing in the normal way with none of this jumping around; each day following the next, the years rolling over linearly, and Toshiya following that steady current: being born, living, dying. Like a tide; like a planet following a singular orbit, whilst Kaoru spins helplessly into retrograde.

Washes up against strange beaches.

There doesn't seem to be any way back. Cold, he begins to work more methodically, trailing his fingers over each gravestone to mark it off, breaking lines in the thin layer of frost that covered over everything. His shoes shake mini icicles from hibernating bushes; a few more flakes of snow whisk through the air in front of his eyes. Everything is white or grey and dead.

In his head, Toshiya as a sixteen year old boy sings to himself as he whirls through a long ago, messy bedroom: _we can be heroes, just for one day_.

He is the only thing that feels alive for miles.

 

Toshiya's gravestone is right at the back, with the newer graves, where Kaoru must surely have known it would be. It should have been obvious from the moment his feet had touched the frozen ground, but like an idiot, he'd gone on pretending it could possibly have been something else, or something other than this strange man who had started throwing rocks into the current of time – who had made ripples, ever expanding, that swell against Kaoru even now.

 

原

敏

政

 

Hara Toshimasa.

Kaoru stands very still. The photograph by the stone is blurry with fresh snow, and he doesn't want to wipe it off. Instead, he lets his eyes linger on those dear characters, tracing every stroke of his sweet name, dwelling on the dates: 31 March 1977 to 9 November 2014.

Kaoru wonders how it had happened, and if he will ever find out – if it had been quick or slow, time for last words or not.

He hopes he had been there.

He hopes he had been able to hold Toshiya's hand, so he would have known that he wasn't going by himself.

Hara Toshimasa. Toshiya.

It kills Kaoru to think that he might have been frightened, and rigidly he places a hand on top of the gravestone to steady himself, thinking: his funny, crazy, slapdash Toshiya, always throwing himself around, rushing into things with no abandon. Finally flinging himself out of this world.

 

_Please, let me have been there._

_Don't let him have been alone_.

 

It hurts him more than he could possibly have imagined to know that Toshiya has died before he is even born: evidence, as if he'd ever needed it, that their lives should never have crossed; that Kaoru should have stuck to his own rules.

Besides the characters spelling out Toshiya's name, on the slender monolith of his gravestone, an incongruous object: round, brass, shine rubbed off by Kaoru's touch over the years. A doorknob.

Before he touches it, he picks up the picture and slips it out of its frame. He allows himself a split-second glance at the face he has known so well before he tucks it carefully inside his jacket, where his heart beats against it wildly.

His face is so cold that his tears feel hot. He grips the doorknob.

He opens the door and the scene changes.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More details about the song: Heroes, by David Bowie. I'm sure you know it. If you don't, listen to it right away.


	2. Aladdin

Toshiya's scrawny, in a growth spurt stage, his hair a shiny black cap around his ears. His brothers have run on, leaving him, but he is the smallest; his legs can't keep up yet. Scowling, he picks up a stick and throws it against a tree.

He wants to be bigger, and it's not fair.

The mountain air is clear and pure in the morning, thin and sharp as a blade. There's a baseball in his hands and a scab on his left knee. He doesn't like playing by himself.

When the stranger appears, it's not threatening: his town is small and safe and quiet, a bright and tiny bubble, even if the stranger looks weird. His hair is blond, which Toshiya has never seen in real life before; only on the television. Underneath all that blond is a thick black ponytail that's the longest hair Toshiya's ever seen, and behind the hair is a man's anxious face, looking around a lot and seeming ill at ease.

He spots Toshiya and hesitates for a minute, looking at him uncertainly.

'Where am I?' he says at last.

This is easy enough because Toshiya is six and he has his address memorised.

'You're in Kiso village, Nagano Prefecture, Japan,' he says, and flings out an arm to point left, 'The river's over that way.'

He adds this last part on his own volition; he's often heard adults describe things as being east or west of the river, so he figures it's useful.

' _Nagano_?'

Toshiya lifts his chin slightly. 'You can get here on the railway,' he says declaratively, 'Or by driving on national route number nineteen.'

The stranger still looks worried, but he smiles a little at that.

'You're a smart kid,' he says, seemingly to himself. Then something seems to happen to him – his expression changes to one that Toshiya can't recognise, and his eyes get bigger in his face. He gives Toshiya a long, long look, and sort of makes to step towards him, but then doesn't.

'Kiso village,' he repeats again finally, in a weird voice, and Toshiya nods a bit more hesitantly because the stranger is being weird now. The man kind of shakes his head, like he's just come up from underwater. 'Is your name Toshimasa Hara?' he says, still in that weird voice, and Toshiya gives him an appraising look.

' _Everyone_ calls me Toshiya.'

'But you are Toshimasa Hara?'

'Yeah,' he says.

 

The stranger stares and stares at him, and Toshiya shifts awkwardly on the spot. The man's eyes are still huge and he has raised his hand to his mouth, and there's a sort of shininess to his eyes like he's about to cry or something.

'I'm sorry,' the man says at last, 'It's just that I haven't seen you in a – in a very long time.'

'How long?' Toshiya asks, his face clearing; he likes numbers. Being six, that's a good thing. It's almost a thousand times better than being five.

'It's been – just a long time. It's hard to say exactly.' He swallows hard, his eyes still wet-looking, 'Hey, how old are you?'

'I'm six years and three months. And...' Toshiya counts on his fingers, 'Six...seven...eight days.' He looks up into the stranger's face. 'How old are _you_?'

'Twenty eight.'

'Exactly twenty eight? It's your birthday?'

'No, I'm...twenty eight years, four months and twenty one days. Exactly.'

'Okay.' Toshiya eyes him thoughtfully. 'What's your name?'

'My name's Kaoru.'

'Isn't that a _girl's_ name?'

'Only sometimes. It can be a boy's name too.'

Toshiya nods, absorbing that information. He throws the baseball high up into the air; tries to catch it behind his back but misses.

'Listen, Toshiya. Can I ask you something?'

'Uh huh.'

'I need to find something. I'm looking for a door with a special kind of doorknob on it. It's round, and it's made of brass, so it's a brown-coloured metal. You know anywhere in the village with a door like that?'

'Yeah.' Toshiya looks at him like he's crazy, 'My closet.'

'Your closet,' Kaoru repeats, sounding like it's bad news. He rubs a hand across the back of his neck, biting down on his lower lip. 'Toshiya, I know it's weird, but do you think I could go and see it?'

'My _closet_?'

'Yeah. It's pretty important. The thing is though, I kind of need to get there without too many people seeing me. Do you think that's possible?'

'Maybe,' says Toshiya doubtfully. 'Nobody's at home right now.'

'Right, your parents are...' Kaoru says, like he's reminding himself of something, but tails off. 'So you live...with your mum and dad right now?'

'Yeah.' Toshiya kicks out at a scrubby patch of grass lamely.

'Where are they at the moment?'

'Out.'

'Are they out a lot these days?' Kaoru asks carefully, and Toshiya gives a rough shrug.

'You have to have a job so that you can buy things to eat.'

'I know, but you're just a kid. You need to have a grown-up in the house with you.'

'I like it best when they're out. They argue all the time.'

'I know, but you're little, Toshiya. There needs to be an adult to look after you.'

He can tell he's said the wrong thing by the offended angle Toshiya holds his shoulders at, crossing his arms firmly over his chest. Still though, after a quiet and slightly sulky moment passes, Kaoru feels a small and surprising hand nestle itself trustfully into his.

'Let's go to see my closet now,' Toshiya says, and he starts to pull Kaoru along.

 

Toshiya's village leads uphill and the houses are very traditional, packed close together and higgledy-piggledy. The mountains loom all around like a bad headache.

'Pretty here,' Kaoru manages to say.

'Uh huh.' Toshiya turns around and casts him an unreadable look. 'My legs get tired going up all the hills.'

'They won't for long. They'll get bigger and stronger.'

'I _want_ to be big. I want to be tall.'

'You will be tall,' Kaoru says, his voice sounding a little like he has a cold.

'How do you know?'

'I just know, that's all.' He shrugs, and Toshiya thinks his eyes look a bit pink, 'You ever feel like you just know something – you can't really explain why, but you know it's true?'

Toshiya thinks hard about this. 'Yeah,' he says, 'sometimes.'

'So you can believe me, then. You're going to be tall.'

'Seven feet tall?'

'No, not as much as seven feet.'

'Oh.'

They lapse back into silence, turning onto a very steep hill that makes Toshiya slow down significantly. It's summer, and it's warm, and Kaoru can feel his t-shirt sticking to him damply. When they round the corner and the hill keeps on going up, Toshiya stops abruptly.

'My legs need a rest,' he says, 'It's too steep.'

'You want me to carry you on my back?' Kaoru offers, and a little spark goes through Toshiya's face.

'Really?'

'Sure. Climb up.' He bends down and feels Toshiya clambering onto his back as nimble as a monkey, skinny arms thrown around his neck. They're surprisingly strong, like wire. 'Which way?'

'All the way up, and then that way.'

'I can't see which way you're pointing, Toshiya.'

'Oh.' He thinks about it. 'Left,' he says uncertainly.

Kaoru hesitates. 'Which left?'

'This one,' Toshiya says, patting Kaoru's right shoulder, and the man has to suppress a smile.

 

The rest of the trek is quiet, Toshiya simply hitting Kaoru's shoulders to make him change direction, obviously enjoying himself a lot. He leads him up to a ramshackle sort of house tucked between two others in a dense row. A crumbling wall stakes claim to a patch of scrubby garden in front of the building, but it hasn't been tended to in some time; it's mostly weeds and baked earth. Nervous now, Kaoru pushes through the gate and lets Toshiya slide down from his back.

'You have a key?' he asks quietly, and Toshiya sends him a look that tells him he's asked a stupid question.

'It's never locked.' He pushes the door open to a dark interior. 'You have to take your shoes off,' he says. 'We don't have spare slippers, though.'

'That's okay.' Slipping quickly through the door, Kaoru pulls off his shoes but picks them up, carrying them loosely at his side. 'Toshiya, are you sure your parents aren't here?'

'They're _never_ here.'

'Okay. Where's your closet?'

Toshiya takes him by the hand again and leads him through the house, which is small and somehow gloomy; the ceiling feels low and the windows are bleary. It's messy, too, and Toshiya weaves an expert path through the clutter, pushing his way into a tiny box room with the bedding still laid out over the floor. There's some kind of stuffed animal caught up in the nest of sheets, and Toshiya stuffs it embarrassedly out of sight.

'There it is,' he says, pointing unnecessarily to the large closet that dominates most of one wall, 'That's the doorknob you said, right?'

'It is,' Kaoru says with relief. Sighing, he gets down on one knee so he can look Toshiya in the eye better, and sets both hands on his shoulders. 'Okay,' he says, 'I'm gonna tell you something, and I need you to listen really, really carefully and do what I say, all right?'

Toshiya gives a one-shouldered shrug, and Kaoru sighs again. 'Just – if any other grown-up ever asks you to do this again, to take them back to your house whilst your parents aren't home, you have to say no, okay? Say no, and as quick as you can, go and find an adult that you can trust.'

'Why?'

'Because some grown-ups want to hurt you,' Kaoru says baldly. 'I don't, I'm safe, but you never know, okay? Even if a person seems really nice and they say that they know your mum and dad, never let them in. Right?'

'Right,' Toshiya agrees dubiously, and Kaoru gives his shoulders a little squeeze.

'Can you promise that for me? It's really important.'

'Okay, I promise.' Toshiya leans forward and presses their foreheads together briefly. 'There.'

'What?'

'I promised.'

Kaoru smiles, but it looks sort of sad.

'Okay, good. The second thing I need to tell you is that in a second, I'm going to disappear. I'm going to walk into your closet and close the door, and when you open it again, I'll be gone.' He hesitates. 'I know that's a really weird thing to happen, so it'll make you want to tell people, but you need to keep it a total secret. Okay?

'Why?' Toshiya says instantly, looking impressed.

'Because it's a really unusual thing to happen in the world, so lots of people don't believe it _can_ happen. So that makes them think that if you say you've seen it, maybe you're crazy. And you're not crazy, so you don't want people to think you are.'

'Crazy like on TV?' Toshiya asks, and Kaoru pauses.

'Kind of,' he says at last, 'But a bit sadder and a bit more scared.'

'Okay.'

'Okay, you won't tell anybody?'

'Okay, I won't tell anybody.' Toshiya grins at him suddenly, 'Can I watch you do it?'

'Sure, I guess.' Kaoru gives his shoulders a final squeeze – the bones feel so fragile and finely turned beneath his hands – and gets to his feet. He stands in front of the closet for a second, and then places his hand on the brass doorknob and opens the door.

'See you around,' Toshiya says nonchalantly, and Kaoru gives him another weird smile: like he's happy but he sort of wants to cry as well.

'Yeah,' he agrees in a peculiar thick voice, 'I'll see you around, Toshiya.' He drums his fingers on the closet hinge for a moment, and then suddenly says, 'Your parents aren't arguing because of you, you know. They have grown-up problems. But none of it is your fault.'

Toshiya gives him a very old smile, rueful, and it's obvious he doesn't believe him.

'Okay,' he says in a quiet voice, and Kaoru nods at him. He takes a deep breath, and as Toshiya watches, he steps through the closet door and closes it behind him.

As soon as it latches Toshiya is running to open it again, and he climbs eagerly inside the closet to look for a hidden door, for a Twilight Zone portal; for _anything_ , but all he finds are his limp hand-me-down clothes.

But Kaoru doesn't see any of this. The scene has already changed, and he's gone.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Aladdin_ by Future Islands. It's sweet, synthy, wistful and wonderful; sort of a song about looking at somebody and wondering if things are real. 
> 
> Comments and criticisms are appreciated and welcomed! Thank you.


	3. Sweet Song

There's nobody around when Kaoru steps through the wall.

He panics slightly, disoriented, and turns around to press at the wall behind him, looking for an opening; he finds it solid and leans back against it, eyes closed in the dimness.

_Not again_.

'Fuck,' he says under his breath and opens his eyes, waiting for them to adjust to the gloom so he can try to get his bearings. He appears to be in a low stone corridor, and something about the air quality tells him he might be underground. He makes out a staircase at one end, going up, but at the top there just seems to be more blackness; closest to him is a door, which he starts to move towards even though the doorknob isn't right.

'Where the fuck am I,' he mutters to nobody.

_When_ would have been a better question.

He opens the door and finds himself in a bar. It's busy, loud with music and conversation, and smoke hangs visibly in the air like a grey shroud. Behind the bar, two wild-looking bartenders mix and pour drinks; an impossibly beautiful girl with bleached platinum hair and an eyebrow ring, and a tall young man with long dark hair, his back to Kaoru as he shakes up a cocktail vigorously. It's a dingy sort of place, but friendly looking, and Kaoru closes the door carefully behind him.

The girl's section of the bar is busier; he seats himself in front of the man. On the back wall, between the shelves of glasses and different liquors, there's an ancient and dirty-looking mirror; Kaoru looks into that, trying to decide whether he looks old enough to not get his ID checked – there's no way he'll be able to show it – and whilst he's looking he accidentally locks eyes with the male bartender.

There's a loud crash and then a silly tinkling noise as the man drops the drink he's working on.

 

He whips around, long black hair flying. His legs are so long that he clears the space between him and that bar in one step; he leans over it and grabs at Kaoru's hands urgently, staring him full in the face.

'It's you,' he says, apparently to himself.

' _What_?'

'This way.'

Kaoru doesn't have time to protest; the bartender is dragging him along, his thin hands surprisingly strong around Kaoru's wrists; he loops around the bar and pulls Kaoru through a door he hasn't noticed, into some kind of back room full of boxes and unused glasses and beer barrels. There's a dog-eared calendar on the wall that says November 1996, so that's at least one question answered: Kaoru has more pressing questions now, however. Whilst he splutters the bartender closes the door with a snap, pushes Kaoru back up against it, and presses their lips together.

It feels nice, but that's not the point: Kaoru shoves him back roughly, wiping the back of his hand across his lips, 'What the _fuck_?'

For the first time, a look of faint uncertainty comes across the bartender's face.

'What? Kaoru...'

'How – how do you know my name?'

The bartender blinks at him. 'What are you talking about? Of course I know your name.'

'But I...' Kaoru squeezes his eyes shut for a second, forces himself to think clearly, 'I think you have me confused with somebody else. We've definitely never met.'

The bartender gives a snort of a laugh, but the smile fades quickly from his lips as he takes in Kaoru's expression and the way he's folded his arms; his own face falls, and he bites his lower lip worriedly.

'Kaoru,' he says softly, and Kaoru feels his head start aching.

'I'm sorry,' he says, trying for a bit of a gentler voice, 'But there's – _definitely_ no way we've ever met.'

_Because I won't be born for another twenty-six years._

The bartender stares at him, an unreadable expression on his face. Up close, he's the most beautiful man Kaoru has ever seen; his face is strange, not quite feminine but not really all the way masculine either; he has a sharp jaw but lips so perfectly formed that looking at them, Kaoru thinks he can still feel them against his own. His eyes are dark and full of some aching question Kaoru can't identify; there's a shine to them, and Kaoru watches as the bartender rubs his eyes to disguise the way a tear has started to slip down his cheek.

'But...' the bartender says quietly, 'But we _have_. Kaoru, you've visited so many times. Kaoru, it's...it's _me_. It's Toshiya.'

There's a slightly desperate sort of look on his face as he says his name, and he takes Kaoru's hand in one of his own, tangling the fingers together; his are longer, his hands larger.

He drops his eyes to their conjoined hands. 'I know it's you,' he says, almost to himself.

'I don't—'

'Look at me,' the bartender says, and Kaoru does. Their dark gazes clash; Toshiya stares hard into his eyes, seeking out any signs of untruth there. Finally, something clears in his expression, and he places a gentle hand on Kaoru's cheek.

'I'm sorry to ask,' he says quietly, 'But how old are you?'

'I'm twenty one,' Kaoru says, confused, and Toshiya shuts his eyes for something longer than a blink. Without saying a word, he gives a soft sigh, and he leans forward to rest his forehead against Kaoru's lightly.

'We haven't met yet,' he says softly, 'That's why. Not in your time. Only in mine.'

'I don't understand—'

Toshiya pulls back. 'When I first met you,' he says carefully, 'You were twenty eight.' He swallows. 'And four months and twenty one days.'

 

Kaoru presses his free hand firmly against the door behind him, checking for its reality. His mind feels like it's moving so fast that it's burnt itself into emptiness; the only sound in there is a kind of strange ringing in his ears.

'But how do you—'

'I was six years old,' Toshiya says clearly, 'When we met. You asked me if I knew of any doors with a brass doorknob.'

Kaoru's mouth feels incredibly dry. 'You know about that,' he says breathlessly, and Toshiya gives a little nod, his hair moving prettily around his face.

'I've seen you...I don't know how many times since then. Hundreds. When I was eight, and twelve, and when I was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen...' he reaches up and strokes Kaoru's hair with a shaking hand, 'You look so young, Kaoru. I've never seen you this young.' He smiles tremulously. 'You warned me that this would happen sometime. It would have to, wouldn't it? But I can't tell you too much about what happens.' He gives a shaky little laugh, 'You look like you just got hit by a bus. Sit down.'

Obediently, Kaoru slides to the floor, raking his hands through his hair. His head feels strangely light, like he's going to faint, and his muscles feel weak and trembly. The floor is dusty but he's grateful for its solidity, and Toshiya steps back to give him some air, sitting down himself on some boxes a respectful few feet away. He crosses his long legs gracefully.

'You know about the travelling,' Kaoru says at last in a hoarse sort of voice, and Toshiya gives a hesitant nod.

'Yes.'

'Can you do it too?' Kaoru asks abruptly, and Toshiya smiles ruefully as he shakes his head.

'Sorry, no.'

'You kissed me.'

'Yeah.'

'We...' Kaoru shoots him an unreadable look, 'I guess we know each other...pretty well. In the future.'

Toshiya gives a restrained nod. 'And the past,' he adds softly.

Kaoru puts his head in his hands. 'I'm sorry,' he says in a tense sort of voice.

'Sorry?'

'Whatever – happened – I shouldn't have let that happen. I'm so sorry. It's not right. I'm – when I travel I avoid it, talking to people, as much as possible. I just try to slip through. It's like a rule.'

'Whose rule?'

' _My_ rule,' Kaoru says firmly, and when he uncovers his face his eyes are damp. 'I'm so, so sorry,' he says in a hoarse voice. 'Whatever – happens – kissing you is too far. I'm so sorry. I should never—'

The expression on Toshiya's face shuts him up, because it's so knowing that Kaoru feels uncomfortable; it's like this strange young man is looking directly inside him, seeing past his eyes into all the channels and dark corners of Kaoru's mind – all the scared places, all the sorry places. It's like he sees them, and he's seen them before; it's like he knows them, maybe almost as well as he knows his own. When he opens his mouth Kaoru's scared of what he's going to say, but all he does is ask, 'Do you have to find your way back right away?'

'I suppose not. Nobody's waiting for me.'

Toshiya smiles a little sadly. 'Okay then. Let's get out of here.'

 

It's only later that it occurs to Kaoru that Toshiya had been working, and that he probably shouldn't have walked out of his job halfway through the evening; at the time, though, he simply lets Toshiya lead him. They go through a short maze of interconnecting doors, up a steep concrete stairway and they're suddenly out in the cold, rainy night air, Toshiya shivering and clutching his bare arms. It's windy, and his hair blows out around his face in a tangle.

He looks beautiful, and Kaoru clenches his fist so hard his nails bite into his skin.

_How could you_ , he asks himself.

_How could you do something so stupid?_

Toshiya leads him through the rainy streets to a small, rundown apartment building a few blocks away. A lot of the windows are broken or boarded up, and there's graffiti sprayed over the door.

'Where are we?' Kaoru thinks to ask.

'Osaka. I used to live in Nagano, in Kiso village. That's where we met.'

The thought is too confusing; Kaoru nods vaguely. Inside the apartment building there's a lift, but Toshiya drags him into a dim, echoey stairwell. The general atmosphere is one of neglect; everything looks like it's crumbling and the few lights are buzzing and flickering. They climb four flights of stairs and then Toshiya's jamming a worn-looking key into a door so flimsy Kaoru wonders why they bothered to install a lock.

It's small inside; a studio with a narrow strip of kitchen, a door that Kaoru guesses leads to the bathroom, and two single beds pushed up against opposite walls. Toshiya flicks on the ceiling light and there's a muffled sound of protest.

' _Seriously_ , Toshiya?'

A figure pushes itself up from the puddle of blankets on one of the beds; it's small and angry-looking, with lots of rumpled blond hair.

'Sorry, Kyo.' Toshiya pulls Kaoru through the door to stand awkwardly next to him. 'Listen, could you...?'

'Oh _no_.'

'Kyo—'

'Oh _no_. _No_. No no no. _Who_ is this?'

'This is Kaoru, and he and I _really_ need the apartment to ourselves, and I did it for you with Rie _three different nights_ last week so I think you should _really_ go and stay at her place for a change.'

There's an angry silence, and then a huffing noise. The man called Kyo flings the sheets off his body angrily and gets to his feet; he's wearing just underwear and a T-shirt even though the apartment is freezing. In a buzz of furious energy he shoves his legs into jeans and forces a sweater over his head, wraps a thick scarf around his face and tugs a coat on over it all. All that's visible is his eyes, and they're glaring at Toshiya hotly.

'You better be loaning me cab money for this little adventure. It's half one in the morning.'

Toshiya rolls his eyes and flings his wallet at the other man, who's short enough to look like almost a different species next to him. Kyo catches it deftly. 'Have fun,' he says sourly, gives Kaoru a short nod, and slams his way out of the apartment.

 

'My roommate,' Toshiya explains into the awkward silence left behind him. Under the harsh ceiling light Kaoru can see that he has shadows under his eyes, and his face is maybe a shade too pale; he toes off his shoes and drops heavily onto the other bed. 'He's not usually in when I bring you over,' Toshiya says tiredly, 'I make sure.'

'I've been here before?'

Toshiya shoots him a sad smile. 'Lots of times. I guess...pretty soon you're going to have a lot of memories of me.'

'It sounds like I will,' Kaoru says uncomfortably.

'I can't believe how young you look,' Toshiya says, gazing at him, 'I don't mean that you look old normally. It's just this time, you...' he shakes his head, his expression rapt.

'How old are you?'

'I'm nineteen.'

They're both silent for a moment, and then Toshiya gives a strange laugh, 'This is ridiculous. All the time we've spent together, and I have no idea what to say to you right now.'

'You say you first saw me when you were six?' Kaoru prompts uncertainly, and Toshiya nods.

'Yeah. And you were twenty eight. I've seen you a few different ages. You're twenty five a lot, twenty six. Twenty nine is the oldest so far, and I've seen you at twenty three, too. So I guess it won't be too long for you until I'll be seeing you again.'

'So we keep on converging,' Kaoru says.

'Yeah, we do.' Toshiya pats the bed next to him, 'Sit down.'

'I...'

A smile quirks at the corners of Toshiya's mouth. 'I'm just asking you to sit,' he says gently, and so Kaoru does so.

'I'm sorry,' he says stiffly, 'It's just...this is very hard to believe. I don't know what to think.' He rubs at his forehead nervously, 'So in my future and your past, we're...lovers?'

Toshiya smiles wider at that.

'I don't want to give too much away.'

'But the way you kissed me...'

Toshiya's smile widens, and carefully he kisses Kaoru again, just lightly, on the cheek.

'You'll have the memories soon,' he says gently.

 

Strangely, there isn't much else to talk about. Toshiya gets a six-pack of beer from the tiny strip of kitchen and they sit up drinking it, chatting about nothing in particular; Kaoru learns that Toshiya and Kyo play in a band together, and that they've been living together ever since Toshiya moved to the city at seventeen. Kaoru can tell that Toshiya feels somehow deeply sad at the fact that Kaoru doesn't yet remember him, but he doesn't know what to do or say to make it right; the beautiful stranger next to him is sweet and funny and compelling but he is still just that, a stranger.

By half past four in the morning they've finished the beer and the whisky Toshiya dug out of a cupboard, and Toshiya has begun to stifle yawns against the heel of his hand. Tired and tipsy, he leans against Kaoru familiarly, his body long and strong and warm.

'I should go,' Kaoru says politely, and Toshiya gives him a sad little look.

'Stay the night,' he says in a small voice, 'Please. I know it's weird for you, but...please. It's been so long since I've seen you. I don't want to sleep without you.'

He catches Kaoru's expression and grips his hand tightly, 'I just mean to sleep, I promise. We'll have to share my bed, though. Kyo would kill me otherwise.' He sighs. 'I guess you won't know yet, but you'll go back in your sleep.'

'Just when I fall asleep?'

Toshiya nods. 'Not right away. But you told me...when you fall asleep, you dream of the door with the brass doorknob. And you open it...'

'I've fallen asleep before? Whilst travelling, I mean?'

'Yeah. When you spend the night with me. You're always gone when I wake up.'

He tries for a smile, but it cracks, and he drops his eyes from Kaoru's to stare fixedly down at his lap again, his posture hunched and broken-looking. Kaoru hears a small sniff, and they're both quiet for a long time.

 

Toshiya sleeps just in his underwear, but Kaoru keeps his T-shirt on; he doesn't know what is or isn't appropriate, huddled up in a single bed with this strange, beautiful young man.

They're pressed together tightly; Toshiya is shivering, and that's his excuse. His body naturally curves around Kaoru's, as if they've done it that way a thousand times before, and Kaoru's surprised to find that he doesn't mind; Toshiya's touch is gentle, and his skin is smooth and smells good to Kaoru, like soap and a hint of something else – perhaps just his natural, inborn scent. He tangles a leg between Kaoru's peremptorily and one of his big, warm hands flattens itself against Kaoru's belly; his chin tucks itself into the gap between Kaoru's jaw and shoulder.

They lie quietly in the darkness for a little while, and Kaoru can feel it: Toshiya's erection pushing against his hip. He shifts, and the younger man sighs.

'Sorry,' Toshiya whispers, the sound of his voice so close by Kaoru's ear sending something like a little weakness through his body, 'It's just being close to you. I can't help it.'

'It's okay. Want me to sleep on the floor, or something?'

In answer, Toshiya's arms tighten slightly around his body. His face is pressed tight against Kaoru's neck, and hesitantly, he dares to kiss the skin there. There's wetness beneath Kaoru's ear, too; he realises Toshiya is crying, breath gasping softly against his skin.

He says in soft, unsteady voice, 'I miss you so much.'

Under the covers, Kaoru takes his hand carefully. 'I'm so sorry I did this to you,' he whispers.

They fall asleep like that, tangled up together, their hands clasped over Kaoru's body.

When Toshiya wakes up, though, he's wrapped only around the sheets, and he's entirely alone.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Sweet Song_ , by Blur. Lovely and soft and vulnerable.


	4. Disorder

He opens the door and the scene changes, and it's too late to go back.

'Fuck!' Kaoru's cigarette falls from his lips as he curses, sizzling when it hits the deep snow clumped on the ground, and he pounds against the wall he has evidently just walked through harshly, 'Fuck, _fuck_!'

The sky is dark, and the snow whirls silently around him; his voice echoes off it strangely. ' _Damn_ it,' he says finally, a little lamely, and takes a few steps backwards. Even if he's been here before he doesn't recognise it; everything is white or black and the snow is so thick he can hardly see two metres in front of him. The night is still, windless but incredibly cold, so cold that every new breath he takes feels like it's cutting his throat, and he wraps his arms around his body tight. When he left it was summer – early June 2045 – and he's wearing only jeans and a T-shirt on top; a T-shirt that's quickly getting soaked through by the snow and starting to feel damp and icy against his hot skin.

Shivering, he lights up another cigarette, wondering where the fuck he is and how he's supposed to get out of here. He can feel the snow gathering in his hair and he hunches his shoulders inward, starting to walk because there's really nothing else he can do.

 

The ground slopes steeply uphill, and he struggles; the snow is deep and powdery. He checks the door of every house he passes, but none of them have the brass doorknob, and he has to get so close to the homes to check that he's sure he's making himself look suspicious to anybody who might be watching him from a window – a twenty-three year old man with dyed blond hair, wearing a T-shirt in a snowstorm and looming up to people's houses like some kind of ghoul. If anybody calls the police, he's truly fucked, he thinks grimly.

The path he's walking suddenly changes direction, a hard right, and he follows, foundering badly in the snow and slipping down at least a few inches for each foot he climbs.

It's frustrating, and he's cold as hell, but at least he's starting to get the feeling like some of the structures around him look familiar; he can't make them out well, but there seems to be something about this hill in his muscle memory. He's still mulling it over when a door bursts open surprisingly close to him; he jumps, almost losing his footing. There's a yellow rectangle of light from the open doorway, and he hears a torrent of screamed insults issue from within as a black-silhouetted body darts out in front of it. The door slams shut, and the screaming is suddenly diminished. Kaoru tries to regain his balance.

'Who's there?' says a suspicious voice – a young sort of voice – and Kaoru sighs; he must look a complete idiot, wobbling around out here in his summer clothes.

'Hi,' he says uncertainly, stepping forward, 'Don't worry. I'm just lost; I'll turn around—'

'It's _you_!'

Kaoru squints against the swirl of white. 'I'm sorry?' he says cautiously. _What year is this, anyway?_

There's no immediate answer, but he hears the shushing sound of somebody walking towards him through the snow; suddenly a face appears, pale and red-eyed and tracked with tears; the face of a kid, weirdly familiar. He dashes the tears off his cheeks impatiently. 'It _is_ you,' he repeats to himself, giving Kaoru an appraising look, 'I remember you.'

'Look, kid—'

'Kaoru,' the kid says, and something clicks into place in Kaoru's mind, sudden and neat as a machine.

' _Toshiya_?' he says incredulously.

'Yeah.'

 

He's wearing an overlarge coat – it looks second hand – and a long scarf looped haphazardly around his neck; his face is a little older, and his limbs look like they've gotten quite a bit longer in a small space of time.

'Toshiya, shit.' Kaoru hugs himself, lost for words: last time he saw Toshiya he was twenty one years old, curled naked around him on a bed. 'How _old_ are you now?' he asks, hoping his voice doesn't sound as weird as he feels.

'I'm eleven.' Toshiya sniffs and then adds, 'Twelve in three months.'

'What...' Kaoru keeps losing his train of thought, his mouth open in surprise; he's even forgotten how cold he is, 'So it's...1988, 1989?'

'December the twentieth, 1988,' Toshiya says mechanically. He pauses. 'And it's eleven forty-five. At night. So it's nearly the twenty first of December.' He clutches the scarf a little tighter around his throat, and despite himself, Kaoru looks at him appraisingly.

'You shouldn't be out this late.'

Toshiya sighs, a weirdly grown-up look on his face; the breath leaves his mouth in a long white plume. 'They're fighting,' he says quietly.

'Your mum and dad?'

He sniffs again. 'Yeah.' He blinks at Kaoru and frowns. 'Why aren't you wearing a coat?' he asks bluntly.

'Oh, I...kind of left in a hurry.'

'Me too, but I got a coat.' He wriggles one arm out of the hugely oversized sleeve and opens the coat wide, 'You better get in.'

'What? No, I'm okay.'

'No, really.' Toshiya sniffs again, 'It's dangerous. Trust me.'

_When did you get so grown up?_

Reluctantly, sure this is doing no wonders for his reputation in the event that anybody is watching through the windows, Kaoru sidles towards the kid and hunkers down next to him, pulling his half of the coat carefully around his shoulders. His elbow gets Toshiya in the ribs and he scowls cartoonishly, which makes Kaoru laugh. 'Sorry.'

'So where did you leave from?' Toshiya asks, which wipes the smile off Kaoru's face pretty quickly.

'Huh?'

'You said you left in a rush.'

'Oh...'

Toshiya shoots him an interested look. 'I know it was somewhere like another dimension or a different planet or something,' he says, 'So there's no point in making anything up. I can handle it.'

'You ever hear that children should be seen and not heard?' Kaoru says lightly, but Toshiya's frown deepens.

'That's what _they_ say,' he mutters, pulling his half of the coat tighter around his body.

'Ah.' Kaoru doesn't know what to say to this kid who seems so innocent and jaded at the same time, and he sort of knocks his head against Toshiya's shoulder companionably. 'Grown-ups don't always know what they're talking about when they say shi– when they say stuff like that.'

Toshiya snorts. 'I know _shit_ ,' he says as if Kaoru's an idiot, 'And I know fuck, and whore, and bastard.'

'You're kind of young to know those words.'

 

From inside the house there's a sound of something smashing, and Toshiya flinches into Kaoru's side, hiding his face in the older man's arm. He can feel how cold and wet his skin is, from the snow, but it's better than nothing: it's dark, and it's quiet, and it's muffled in the way he needs it to be. He holds his breath tight to stop himself from making any crying-type noises.

'Shit,' Kaoru says under his breath, and he feels a tremulous smile against his skin. Wondering when life got so strange, he puts a tentative arm around Toshiya's shoulders, pulling the kid so he's nestled more into his chest than his bony arm. 'Do they fight like this often?'

'Every night,' Toshiya says in a muffled voice. He pauses. 'I hate it.'

'Do they...do they ever hurt you?' Kaoru asks gently, but Toshiya just shrugs.

'They hate each other,' he says in a blank sort of voice, 'And they hate me, too.'

'They don't hate you.'

'How would you know?'

Kaoru sighs, giving Toshiya's thin shoulders a small squeeze, 'Just trust me.'

'I'll trust you if you answer my question.'

'What question?' Kaoru says dully, a sinking feeling in his chest.

'I want to know where you came from.'

'Oh, right.' Kaoru swallows. 'I came from a city called Ashiya, in Hyogo prefecture. That's where I was born. But more recently, I moved to Osaka, so that's where I came from tonight.'

'In this dimension?'

'Yeah, in this dimension. I don't even know if there are any others.'

Toshiya sighs. 'That's not the truth,' he says in a defeated voice.

'It is the truth.'

'Not the _whole_ truth, though.'

'What makes you so sure?'

'Because you disappeared through the back of my closet,' Toshiya says, his voice suggesting that he's speaking to a total moron; he pulls his head away from Kaoru's chest and looks into his eyes challengingly – there's a shadow of him then, the man he'll become. 'That's why. And I went in there about a million times and _I_ can't do it.'

'Maybe you dreamt it,' Kaoru says uneasily, and Toshiya the child gives him a disapproving look so reminiscent of Toshiya the adult that it leaves him speechless.

Adult Toshiya knows the truth, about the travelling.

_Is this it? Is this supposed to be the point where I tell him for the first time; is this when he finds out?_

 

Kaoru takes a deep breath. 'Okay, you didn't dream it,' he says bracingly. 'And you can choose to believe this or not, okay? It's the truth, but if it makes you more comfortable, or if it makes you feel a bit happier and safer, you can probably go ahead and think that this is just some more of the stupid shit that adults say. Right?'

'Right,' Toshiya agrees easily.

'The truth is that I'm a guy from a completely normal place.'

'Ashiya in Hyogo, and now Osaka.'

'Exactly. But, since I was a kid – younger than you are now – I've been able to time travel. It's not by choice; mostly it just sort of happens when I walk through a certain door.'

'The door with the brass doorknob?' Toshiya asks uncertainly, and Kaoru gives a single nod.

'Right. That door.'

For a long moment they're both quiet, staring out at the swirling snow. It plays tricks on the eyes; everywhere Kaoru looks, it feels like people are moving towards them. He's conscious of shifting his body slightly so Toshiya is further inside the coat, angled sort of behind him, like it'll protect him from harm. In the cold, silent night air the shouting from the house is muffled but still mostly distinct, and Kaoru understands where Toshiya learnt all those swear words.

'So what year are you from?' Toshiya asks, and Kaoru smiles. He'd half-expected Toshiya to not believe him, despite what happened with the closet, but there it is: he's eleven years old. Young enough to believe in magic still, and in monsters.

'Well, I was born in 2022, and I'm twenty six years old. Can you work it out?'

Toshiya's quiet for a minute. 'You came from 2048?'

'Correct.'

'And you opened a door and you came out here?'

'That's right.'

'Even though you weren't even born yet?'

'Yeah.'

'So am I _older_ than you?' Toshiya asks, his voice utterly confused, and Kaoru grins.

'In this time, no. But in my time – in 2045, I mean – yeah, you're definitely older.'

'In your time I'm sixty _eight_!' Toshiya says, and this time his voice isn't just confused; there's a hint of panic in it, too. It takes the smile from Kaoru's face; in that moment, he sort of hates himself.

'Hey, Toshiya.' He squeezes him in what he hopes is a soothing way, 'Take it easy, okay? It doesn't have to be scary. You can always say I'm just talking shit, all right? Just grown-up shit. I can promise you that you can say that, and nobody in the whole world will be angry with you for it. Okay?'

Toshiya nods, pressing his lips together, but he's shaking a little; Kaoru's not sure if it's from their conversation or the cold.

'Are you freezing?' he asks gently, and Toshiya gives a little jerk of a nod. 'You should go back inside,' he says in a soft voice, but he knows Toshiya won't agree even before the kid gives his head a stubborn shake. As if to punctuate his silent no, there's another shattering sound from inside the house; Toshiya twitches violently. Kaoru sighs.

'Okay, come here.' He dusts some snow off the low wall around the house and sits on it, pulling Toshiya along with him and wincing at the feeling of ice-cold stone through his jeans. 'Take your other arm out of the coat.'

'Why?'

'Just trust me.'

Dubiously Toshiya does so, and Kaoru opens his arms wide, 'Okay, get up on my lap.'

'You want me to sit on your lap?'

'Yes, I do. You'll freeze if you sit on this stone wall; it's cold as fuck.'

The bad language helps; Toshiya grins. 'But won't you be cold sitting on it?' he asks.

'Yeah, but my body's bigger, so it can hold more heat than yours.'

The logic helps even more: Toshiya climbs up, his body easy and athletic in the way Kaoru doesn't think his own has ever been. Once Toshiya is settled, he pulls the coat firmly around them both.

He's never had a kid on his lap before.

'You have cigarettes in your pocket,' Toshiya says.

He can't think about the future; he can't think of what Toshiya will grow up to be to him. In this moment, he has to be an adult sheltering a child, and nothing more. He grits his teeth guiltily.

_At some point, I betray him._

_Kid, I'm so sorry for what I do to you_.

It's an impossible situation, because he knows that what he is doing now is setting Toshiya up to fall for him later on, and for all that entails – missing him, being left, being disappeared on time and time again.

He can't stop doing it, though – can't walk away from this child and leave him in the snow – because he already loves him.

 _I'm so sorry, Toshiya_.

 

'You know you're gonna have to go home at some point,' Kaoru says after a long silence, and huddled against his chest, Toshiya gives a small nod.

'Not yet, though.' He peers up at Kaoru curiously. 'Do _you_ have to go back?'

'Yeah, of course I do.'

'Soon, though?'

'Well, I don't know. I've never stayed very long in the past.'

'But you have to find the door?'

'Either find the door, or fall asleep. When I fall asleep in the past, I dream I'm opening the door, and when I wake up I'm back.'

'So do you have to fall asleep or find the door right now?'

Kaoru laughs, 'I don't think I have much chance of falling asleep back here. Pretty soon I'll have to go and find the door. Time keeps going on in the present, you see – my present, I mean – so if I don't get back, people will worry I've gone missing.

 _Like my boss, for example, when he fires me from my eighth job this year_.

He sighs, his breath ruffling the hair on Toshiya's head.

'When I go home,' Toshiya says quietly, 'You can come with me and use my closet again. It's still got the same doorknob. That's what you need, right?'

'It's what I need, but I'm not sure if that's safe with your parents in the house.'

Toshiya gave his head a little shake. 'They never notice me,' he mumbles, a little break in his voice, and Kaoru gives his hair a gentle stroke.

'If you want to cry,' he says in what he hopes is a neutral voice, 'That's okay, kid. It doesn't make you weak or stupid, and nobody's going to see it but me.'

'Boys aren't allowed to cry,' Toshiya says in a tremulous voice, and Kaoru smiles softly.

'That's not true in the future,' he says as lightly as he can, 'It's good for boys to cry just as well as girls. If your body didn't want you to cry, it wouldn't make tears.'

'Yeah?' Toshiya says in a muffled voice, but Kaoru doesn't have any time to answer before two strong, skinny arms have wrapped themselves around his chest and Toshiya's small face is pressed just below his chin, sobbing roughly into his neck. His shoulders judder violently, and Kaoru gives his back a tentative rub. They stay like that for a long time, Toshiya crying and Kaoru not sure what to say. His neck feels warm and damp.

'It'll be all right,' he says lamely.

' _How_?'

'...It just will be, I promise.'

'Grown-up shit,' Toshiya mutters against his skin, and Kaoru laughs softly.

'It's really true this time.'

'I've finished crying now.'

'That's good. You feel better?'

'A little bit.'

It's not as though it makes a sound or anything, but somehow it catches both of their attention; the handle on the door of Toshiya's parents' house, suddenly a round brass doorknob.

Kaoru feels Toshiya sigh slowly against his chest, and he's glad he's eleven and young enough to accept something completely irrational without too much mental damage. The kid slips off his lap, and Kaoru takes off the coat, draping it around him carefully.

'Time to go?' Toshiya asks solemnly, and Kaoru gives a small nod.

'I don't have to,' he says, 'But I guess if you believe in signs from the universe, this could probably be considered a sign from the universe.'

'Right.' Toshiya gives him a small smile. 'Will you come back again?'

'I'm not sure. I don't really get to control where I travel to.' He notes the disappointed look on Toshiya's face and feels like a complete idiot. 'If I end up in your time, though,' he adds quickly, 'I'll try to find you, I promise.'

Toshiya nods, and leads Kaoru towards the front door of his house. Outside, he pauses, fighting the urge to clap his hands over his ears.

'You go first,' he says. 'I want to see.'

'You've already seen.'

'Again.'

Kaoru sighs. 'Promise you'll go in as soon as I'm gone? It's not safe to wander around late at night, especially not when it's this cold.' He gives an involuntary shiver.

'Yeah, I promise.' He motions for Kaoru to bend down, and when he does and they're on the same level, Toshiya presses their foreheads together seriously. When he pulls back he swipes a hand over his cheeks, clearing off the remains of his tears, and gives a little sniff. 'You'll just disappear?'

'That's right.'

Kaoru's hand touches the doorknob, and he sort of wants to say something like _I love you_ , or _I'll see you when you're older_ , but of course he can't. 'It'll be okay,' he says again, lamely.

He opens the door and the scene changes.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes about the song: _Disorder_ , by Joy Division. It's a kind of theme I have in my head for Toshiya throughout this whole story.  
> Thanks as ever for reading, and please take the time to drop me a comment if you can! It keeps me typing faster.


	5. Born Slippy

The door closes behind him and a cold wind whips at his hair, tangling it in front of his eyes so he can't see. It's dark, and from the hulking building in front of him – what looks like a huge warehouse with no windows – there's a heavy throb of bassy music, spilling messily into the night.

He straightens his shoulders, takes a deep breath of the night air: it's sooty and cold tasting. He appears to be in the middle of an industrial estate, almost completely deserted – it must be late at night. By reflex he checks his watch, but it's still on present time: three forty-five in the afternoon.

Sighing, he pushes open the door of the building in front of him, once he finds it; the entrance is as nondescript as the place itself. Inside, a deep wave of heat presses itself into his skin and the music makes his teeth shake and there are bodies _everywhere_ , dancing and jumping and drinking and arguing, and every skin has the same sweaty sheen, glowing under the neons.

It's the music that catches his attention though: it's pulsing trance techno, reverberating off the wall in 4/4 time, a whole roomful of people rippling to it like a wave. It's so obnoxious that Kaoru knows there's only one era he can possibly be in, unless he's found himself in the far future where this kind of thing is undergoing a crazy revival: the 1990s.

His heart feels like it's expanding in his chest. _Toshiya_.

_Are you here?_

 

Sticking to the walls, he begins to move his way through the crush of sweaty bodies. He feels a little self-conscious; nobody here looks older than twenty-three and here he is, a thirty-one year old man in his oldest, most torn-up jeans and a plain black T-shirt, his dark brown hair a messy tangle around his face. He flexes his small hands, taking a lame sort of comfort from the darkly tattooed skin there; at least he doesn't look like a _total_ square.

Once he's squeezed himself around every inch of the cinder block walls, he tries the bar, but Toshiya's not there, either in front of it or behind it. He's preparing himself to dive into the heaving mass of bodies on the makeshift dance floor when some serendipity walks right past him: short, dyed blond hair, lip piercing, pissed off expression – it's Toshiya's weird roommate.

Kaoru follows the shorter man to a pile of wooden pallets where a group of people are lying and sitting, their drinks and coats scattered between them; Kaoru searches them urgently, his hands awkwardly stuffed into his pockets. It's dark; the people are little more than shadows—

'Toshiya?' he yells stupidly above the music, and something incredibly hot slams into his midsection.

' _Kaoru_!'

A pair of thin, sweaty arms lock like a vice around his neck and he feels half a drink get poured down the back of his shirt, but he doesn't care: there's a pair of big, deep brown eyes looking into his own, and he can feel his heart rising up in his throat like a balloon. Toshiya, _his_ Toshiya, perhaps twenty years old and simply beautiful.

Toshiya reads the question in his eyes and laughs, putting his lips very close to Kaoru's ear, 'It's March eleventh, 1997.'

He's still nineteen. Kaoru's thumbs smooth over his cheekbones, registering the reality of that impossibly beautiful face; he leans in and captures his lips in a gentle kiss.

Immediately there's a chorus of loud _oooh_ s from behind them, and Toshiya grins against his mouth.

'C'mon,' he says, 'Dance with me.'

 

So they dance. In the mass of bodies there's no way to be but pushed tight together, Toshiya's arms around Kaoru's waist and the scent of him everywhere, getting up under Kaoru's skin and going to his head; he's hard and he knows Toshiya can feel it from the little looks and touches the other man keeps giving him.

There's sweat pouring down his back and dripping from the ends of his hair. They're both drenched, their skins hot and slick; Toshiya's hair is sticking to his neck and face in damp spikes and his hands are pushing up under Kaoru's T-shirt, touching his skin through the thick heat. He tugs him forward and kisses him, their bodies pressed together from lips to feet, and when he finally pulls away he's panting.

'Outside,' he says raggedly.

'Toshiya—!'

The other man is already pulling him, somehow knowing his way in the flickering dark; he leads him single-mindedly towards the same door Kaoru came in through and gropes blindly, checking for any presence of a brass doorknob before he opens it and pushes Kaoru through, the pulsing heat spitting them out into the cold night air. The sky is distant and black, full of hard stars, and Kaoru gets a split-second look at it before Toshiya has pushed him up against that door and is kissing him deeply, shivering in the wind, his body hot to the touch.

'Toshiya,' Kaoru says weakly, but the younger man just shakes his head.

'I want to make you cum,' he says urgently, his words going straight to Kaoru's dick; he groans, and Toshiya's lips start to attack his neck, kissing and licking and sucking so he'll have marks tomorrow, whenever that tomorrow might be.

'Toshiya,' Kaoru gasps, ' _Here_?'

'Right here,' Toshiya murmurs against his skin, one long fingered hand unzipping Kaoru's jeans and slipping easily inside them, feeling him through his underwear. He's hot against Toshiya's hand, pushing insistently against his palm; Toshiya squeezes and closes his eyes as Kaoru moans in his ear. 'How old are you?' he asks in a whisper.

'I'm – fuck, _Toshiya_ – I'm thirty-one.'

'And nothing's changed; you still love me?'

'Of course I—' he gasps, '— _love_ you. I'll always love you.'

 

Toshiya drops to his knees and presses his tongue lewdly to the bulge in Kaoru's boxer briefs, pulling the groan from the older man's throat. One hand grips Kaoru's hip whilst the other fumbles with the waist of his underwear, tugging his clothing down and exposing him to the night; his cock is hard, flushed, twitching when Toshiya slides a gentle hand over it.

He ducks his head and licks all the way from the base to the tip, listening to the sounds above him; Kaoru gasping deep in his chest and music leaking out through the door. He tastes like he remembers; he licks until Kaoru is writhing, his body flattening uselessly against the door behind him, and takes the very head of his dick between his lips. His eyes flick upwards and he finds Kaoru watching him as he starts to suck, a gentle hand stroking through his sweaty hair.

'Toshiya,' he says, his voice deep and throaty, 'You feel so good.'

Toshiya slips off his dick with a soft wet sound, 'Did you miss me?' He curls his tongue around the tip of Kaoru's cock, flattening over the slit.

'Yes, fuck – _fuck_. I missed you like crazy.'

Toshiya's hand squeezes his hip harder and he takes all of him in one go, pushing his head down firmly so Kaoru is completely buried in his hot wet mouth; he makes a sound, a muffled moan around the dick between his lips, and Kaoru says his name in a broken sort of voice. He can hear his breath getting ragged and the wind tugging the gasps from his throat; his chest rises and falls sharply and between his legs Toshiya's head bobs rhythmically. His eyes want to fall closed but he can't stop watching: Toshiya is so young and so fragile-looking and his lips stretch so beautifully around Kaoru's dick, taking it as deep as he can. His heart thuds hard, making the inside of his chest feel bruised and sensitive, and he knows that each heavy beat is making his cock push more insistently against Toshiya's tongue, but he's helpless. It just feels too good; far too good to stop. He opens his mouth to breathe but cries out instead, his hand tightening involuntarily in Toshiya's hair.

There's a sudden flash of an image in his head: Toshiya naked in front of him for the first time, his body beautiful and awkward and his eyes soft and dark and nervous and his shaking hands reaching out to pull Kaoru towards him, saying _I've wanted this since I was thirteen years old_. Kaoru squeezes his eyes shut tightly, whispers his name.

Toshiya hears it over the roaring of his own heart in his ears as he moves over the other man's cock, feeling the heat and hardness of it at the back of his throat. He's conscious of nothing else but wanting: of wanting him, all of him, as much as possible; wanting the taste of him on his tongue and the feeling of his hands curling in his hair, gentle now, stroking and urging; wanting the shake in Kaoru's thigh as he tries not to push his hips forward. He wants, he wants; he wants so much he could cry from it.

Kaoru moans, a rough version of Toshiya's name. His eyes are drawn to some movement below Toshiya's hips and he realises his lover has his own hand down his pants and that he's stroking himself off to the rhythm of his mouth, his movements getting faster and more erratic, and it's all Kaoru can take, the sight of that. He gives a strangled cry, biting down on his own hand to muffle it, and his orgasm hits him like a freight train; bucking his hips, he empties himself into Toshiya's mouth. His knees tremble hard beneath him and he slides to the floor, letting Toshiya lean forward and press their sweaty foreheads together as he strokes himself off, his hand fisting the head of his own dick desperately; he bites down hard on his lower lip, a moan in his throat, and tangles an arm around the back of Kaoru's neck as he loses himself. His cum spatters hotly onto the pavement between Kaoru's feet, and he pants for breath. With their foreheads pressed together like that, Kaoru's eyes are the only thing he can see. They kiss, and Kaoru can taste himself on Toshiya's lips.

'You've been gone so long,' he whispers.

'I'm sorry.'

Toshiya kisses him again, roughly; pulls him to his feet. 'You're here now.'

 

Back inside they get drinks, Toshiya paying because Kaoru's money has pictures of people who either don't exist or are still children at the present time. Toshiya leads the way back over to the collection of old pallets where his friends are sitting, still sprawled in amongst the coats, some of them splitting off to go dance and then coming back, sets of them drifting to and from the bar constantly.

'Where did _you_ get to?'

Toshiya's engulfed by a man as tall as he is; a lanky redhead with a wide smile. He hugs onto him and his smile turns wicked; he backs away, holds Toshiya at arm's length and says declaratively over his shoulder to the group, 'He smells of cum.'

Toshiya flushes a beautiful red colour and there's a chorus of good-natured laughter from behind him which makes Kaoru smile. Shyly he places his hand on the small of Toshiya's back; he can't pretend he fits in here, with this group of young friends, but it's nice to be able to live the life just for one night. He just has to make sure that he doesn't accidentally run into them again in what passes for them as a few days' time, looking inexplicably twenty years older. He's already anxious that Kyo will notice that his face has aged seven years in a matter of months, but maybe it's okay: he doesn't think Toshiya's roommate – half asleep and busy bitching Toshiya out – took a very clear look at him, after all.

Scanning around, Kaoru realises that he can't see Kyo; he's not one of the crowd of friends who have pushed close to Toshiya to mutter questions in his ears about this stranger he's holding hands with. Kaoru squints and finally makes out Kyo. He's sitting right at the back of the group, planted on top of a pile of coats so he looks a little taller than he is, and once Kaoru finds him it's hard to lose him again because the smaller man is staring at him so fixedly he can _feel_ it. Uncomfortably, he gives Toshiya's hand a little squeeze and moves towards him. Endorphins are still buzzing happily through his veins and he can still feel some kind of ghost of it, Toshiya's lips and tongue against him; he picks his way through the coats, noting with a little unease that Kyo hasn't broken his intense eye contact all the while. Finally he settles down beside him, makes to clink his beer bottle against the other man's, but realises he isn't holding one.

'Hi,' he says awkwardly instead. 'I don't know if you—'

'I remember,' Kyo says shortly. 'I think you've got a lot of fucking nerve showing up here.'

 

Kaoru puts his beer down with a quiet thunk. 'I'm – sorry, what?'

Kyo turns towards him and the look in his eyes isn't just intense now; it's venomous, almost liquid with hate.

'You heard,' he hisses shortly. 'I'm sick of your shit.'

Kaoru shakes his head uncomprehendingly, 'I'm sorry. I don't know what you mean.'

'I mean that I'm sick of seeing my best friend torn to pieces every time you roll into town, fuck him, and then disappear again.' He shakes his head disgustedly. 'How _old_ are you, anyway?'

Kaoru opens his mouth to answer but Kyo cuts him off angrily, 'It doesn't matter. Guys like you will never change, will you? Did you realise that he's an actual _person_? That he has feelings and a life and stuff? Look at him,' Kyo demands, stabbing his finger in Toshiya's direction, and Kaoru does, shaken: he looks and sees Toshiya laughing with his tall friend and another guy, a teenage-looking guy who looks prettier than most girls and who is laughing behind his cupped hand. Toshiya looks young in that moment; beautiful, but almost _painfully_ young, and Kaoru feels his creeping shame as something physical, like a kind of animal; it crawls up his leg, edges over his knees and settles in his lap.

'I love him like a brother,' Kyo says forcefully. 'Probably _more_ than I'd love a brother, because everyone in my family is fucking _crazy_. You can't – treat him – like this. It's not fair.'

'Kyo, I don't—'

'Does it make you feel good?' Kyo interrupted him harshly, 'Fucking some nineteen year old kid in his single bed? Does it make you feel like a big _fucking_ man?'

'It's not like that,' Kaoru says quietly, and Kyo gives a derisive snort.

'I think it's exactly like that. You know, he _really_ likes you, and ordinarily that would make me not want to be a prick to you. But all you ever do is ass-fuck my friend _right_ in the heart, and I hate it.'

There's an air of finality to his words, and he leans back a little, taking a deep breath. Kaoru shakes his head slightly, trying to clear it.

'I don't know what to say,' he says softly.

'Some kind of explanation would be good, but if you can't manage that, a promise to leave him the fuck alone would do nicely.'

Kaoru bites his lip. 'I can't promise that.'

Kyo's gaze darkens considerably, and Kaoru sighs. 'I'm in love with him,' he says.

'Pretty funny way of showing it. You got a wife or something?'

'What? No. No wife.'

'It's not a crazy question,' Kyo says scathingly, 'You come out of nowhere and fuck him and then you fuck off someplace else before he wakes up in the morning. Pretty natural to assume there's some little woman at home you're cheating on. Maybe a couple of kids as well.'

'No. No wife. No kids.'

'Any other excuse?'

Kaoru sighs. 'I'm sorry,' he says, rubbing his hands against his temples, where a headache is starting, 'I can't explain. I know you don't have any reason to believe me, but I love him more than anything. There's no way I'd treat him like this unless I had to.'

It sounds lame even to him, and he feels suddenly incredibly depressed. He looks over at Toshiya and the feeling gets worse; he's drinking, laughing, having a good time; he looks up at Kaoru and sends him a glowing smile that sends his stomach plummeting.

'That's your excuse?'

'Best I can do,' Kaoru says tiredly. Kyo picks up Kaoru's beer bottle, considers it a moment, and flings the contents into Kaoru's face before he walks away.

 

'He's a good friend,' Kaoru says as they walk in the grey pre-dawn, shoulders hunched against the wind, his voice hoarse from shouting above the music, 'He cares about you.'

'He's interfering,' Toshiya says angrily, his fist grasping a handful of Kaoru's T-shirt reflexively, 'And he's wrong.'

They're going nowhere in particular. The streets are as quiet as they'll ever be at this hour, and they end up following the canal through Dotonbori, their faces lit up by the myriad glowing signs.

'He's right, though,' Kaoru says in a quiet voice, gripping Toshiya's hand tightly, 'None of this is fair to you.'

'It's not fair to you, either. Kaoru...' Toshiya knocks his forehead frustratedly against the older man's shoulder, 'This isn't your choice. I know that.'

'But it's not too late for you, Toshiya. You deserve – you deserve somebody who can always be here; who will always be around you, whenever you want them. You deserve somebody you can have a whole life with, not just... _parts_ of a life.'

'So you don't think it's fate, that you keep running into me? You've got the entire space-time continuum at your disposal, and you think it's coincidence that you keep finding yourself in the late twentieth century, within fifty feet of me?'

Kaoru smiles grimly. 'Even if it is fate,' he says gently, 'That doesn't mean you have to follow it. Not if you don't want to.'

'Kaoru, are you trying to give me an _out_?'

'I guess I am.'

'Are you _kidding_ me?' Toshiya says disbelievingly. 'I was meant to be with you, you know that. From the time I was _six years old_ I was meant to be with you. I grew up with you; you've always been there when I've needed you; I – nobody else is going to do, don't you see that? It has to be you for me. That's the only way. Because you—' he pauses, gesticulating helplessly, his voice so serious it's nearly angry, 'You are my _family_.'

He stops there, on the street, frowning. Almost roughly, he pulls Kaoru into a hug, resting his chin against his hair.

'So quit it,' he says finally, muffled. 'And come back to mine. I don't care if Kyo is there, and neither should you.'

 

They do walk back to Toshiya's apartment building, walking quietly but close together in the growing light of the new day, shivering in the wind. The door of Toshiya's block, though, has grown a brand new feature: a round, dull-looking brass doorknob.

Toshiya closes his eyes, and he holds onto Kaoru for a long time.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Born Slippy (nuxx)_ by Underworld - aka, that clubby song made famous by the movie _Trainspotting_. It was really in my head for this scene, particularly whilst they're dancing, but also for this fic in general. It shouldn't fit so well, because the beat is very relentless and the lyrics are almost nonsensical, but something about the melody, particularly at the beginning and after the break in the middle, just feels to me like the sound of people moving around each other...or somebody being pushed back and forth in time. There's a melancholia that just fits, to me, despite it being a club song. 
> 
> With that out of the way, please leave a comment if you can! I'm not feeling as inspired with this fic as I was, purely because it doesn't really feel like anybody's reading/enjoying. If you are, please do let me know.


	6. Ingénue

Detention makes Toshiya late walking home. At this time of year, the sun is already going down, and the light shines reddish through the trees and the eaves of the houses. The air is cool and still, crisp, and the red sky fades into a light bluish grey overhead, decorated all over with thin skeins of dark cloud. The only sound is that of his own feet making crunching noises through the leaves that have fallen early, and the distant call of some croaky-voiced bird. The air smells of sap.

He follows a winding path through the skinny tree trunks, eventually coming out at a wide, windblown field. It's not been tended to over the whole of the faded summer: the grass is almost knee high. Superstitiously, he glances around, looking for any hint of a familiar body lurking in the gathering dimness, but he sees nothing. Unconsciously, he sighs.

Kaoru has a funny habit of appearing just when Toshiya thinks he needs him most, but he feels like he needs him today, and he's not here.

_Where are you?_

_When_ are you, he should ask. He sets out across the field, a jagged sort of figure with legs grown too suddenly too tall for him; his walk is coltish and rangy; his hands jammed into his pockets make an awkward angle out of his elbows; he's thirteen, pretty in a way he's aware that boys shouldn't be – all long hair and delicate features, lips that look pouty no matter how he holds them, waist slender, eyes big and forever sending the wrong message, getting him into trouble.

He kicks out at the grass, feeling the longer blades rip against the toes of his shoes.

 

This is where he and Kaoru first met. It's funny how so many other memories of that time have faded away, whilst that one still stands sharp in his head: being six years old and standing here, Kaoru asking, _where am I?_

Giving Toshiya that look – such a strange look – and knowing his name. Recognising him and not saying a word about it. Carrying Toshiya on his back up the hill – Toshiya still remembers the way the other man's shoulders felt under his hands; to him Kaoru seemed so strong back then, so big, carrying him so effortlessly. It was strange, because Toshiya had thought he'd known what strength was, but this had felt like something else; it was a strength that was gentle; a strength that listened. He had missed it, when Kaoru was gone.

At the other end of the field, Toshiya climbs the rickety wooden fence and boosts himself easily over the top of it, dropping down onto a cobbled street that turns up into a sharp hill. He shoves his hands back into his pockets and carries on up the familiar route, the ghost of Kaoru beside him.

He remembers the soft, dissolving sort of feeling he got in the pit of his stomach, riding on the older man's back, their bodies close together like that. It was something he didn't understand at the time, but later it had all started to make sense; he remembers touching himself for the first time, lying on his side under the covers one night, and how familiar it had felt – that funny little flicker of arousal, before he even knew what the word meant.

He makes shorter work of the walk now than he did when he was six, and soon his parents' house stands in front of him – the last on the row since the Nakamuras' property was pulled down, tatty-looking with its missing roof tiles and weathered siding, and the gate that creaks and the wall that looks like it's about to fall down, the scrubby patch of garden full of weeds; he tries his best not to see it, marching firmly down the path.

It's only at the front door that he hesitates, taking a deep breath and steeling himself before he pushes his way inside.

 

Silence.

It's not like he expected anybody to be in. The eldest of his two brothers have both moved out already, and although Hiro still nominally lives at home he's generally off in Nagano City somewhere, smashing out street lights and getting into trouble on a borrowed motorbike. His mother will still be at work, and his father will be at work if it's a good day and drinking in some bar if it's a bad day. He can never be sure until his father arrives home and he's able to look at his face; try and read the emotional weather there.

Toshiya takes off his shoes and arranges them neatly by the door, ignoring the shoe rack because like many other things in the house, it's broken. His bedroom is still the same room that he first led Kaoru to when he was six years old, and once he's in there he closes the door firmly behind him, drops his school bag in the corner and crosses over to the cassette player. He has a mixtape he's created shoddily, taping songs from the radio, and he jams that into the player and hits play. There's a click and a whining sort of noise – like everything else in the room, the cassette player is old – but gradually that clears and he closes his eyes briefly as the sound of Joy Division playing _Atmosphere_ fills his tiny bedroom.

Sighing deeply, he begins to undress, pulling off his hated school uniform throwing it into a messy pile in the corner. He does this in front of the window, gazing listlessly out at the view because there's nobody around to see him; this house backs onto nothing but mountain, rising up and up and up until it makes him sick; until it looks like it's puncturing the sky, leaking clouds. Naked, he crosses closer to the window and peers out of it; the view is pretty – or it could be pretty at a different time of year; the house backs onto a forest and at this time of year the trees look stark and intimidating – but his face isn't happy. He looks out searchingly, his eyes scanning every square inch of space for a familiar face, for the familiar line of a shoulder or a flash of familiar skin.

'Where are you,' he mutters, hardly realising he's spoken aloud.

 

Turning away, he goes mechanically to his closet and, with a furtive look around him, twists the brass doorknob and steps inside. It's a much more awkward manoeuvre than it was when he was six; he has to bow his head just to fit inside, and when he finally gets the door closed behind him, it's claustrophobically cramped, his elbows pressed tight against his body.

He's seen Kaoru disappear inside here before, so why can't Toshiya pull the same trick? Taking a deep breath, he slides down until he's sitting, his knees bent uncomfortably close in front of him. Carefully he rests his hands on them, his whole body curled up like a stone; he lowers his head and closes his eyes in the darkness and, as hard as he can, wills it to happen.

Not just to disappear, but to come out the other end – to come out where Kaoru is. He wonders what he's doing; if he's going about his normal life. It's a nonsensical thought because of course Kaoru hasn't even been born yet, but it's almost impossible for Toshiya to think of that as the truth; far easier to think of him as always alive, always somewhere. Existing in the way the reflection in the mirror exists, a place almost identical but flipped; he lives his parallel life, goes to his parallel job and sleeps in his parallel bed, and all the while Toshiya is pressing up against the glass that separates their two worlds. Invisible, always, because it seems this glass is one-way; Kaoru can reach out, but he can't reach in.

He takes another deep breath, tries to imagine what the world is like in Kaoru's time but it's impossible, like trying to imagine a brand new colour. Kaoru will never talk about it when Toshiya asks, not even when he begs; he senses that's another of his precious _rules_.

'You'll know one day,' he always says, and though it's a cheap distraction it works, because he's talking about the day in the future when they'll live in the same time, and it's a wistful idea but a bittersweet one.

By the time Kaoru is born, Toshiya will be forty-five years old. He checks his mental arithmetic and scrubs that out; forty- _four_ , he amends, because he's pretty sure Kaoru's birthday is February 17, and Toshiya's isn't until the end of March.

Forty-four years old, and Kaoru a tiny baby. By the time Kaoru's eighteen, he'll be sixty-three.

He tips his head back, letting his skull hit the side of his closet with a _thunk_ ; the thin wooden sides sway slightly around him, cheaply made.

Say Kaoru lives to be seventy or so: Toshiya will probably be dead for about half his life.

 

It's comforting inside the closet. He's surrounded by the smell of himself; his own clothes and the detergent they're washed in, and his own bedding folded on a shelf. He wonders what Kaoru thought, stepping through this door and coming out somewhere else.

He wonders if Kaoru ever wishes he could do the same thing backwards.

Toshiya closes his eyes and settles down more comfortably, relaxing his limbs as much as he can inside the small space; this is his time. He doesn't have to worry about school again for at least another – he calculates quickly – fifteen hours or so, and it's only five so it'll be a little while before anybody else arrives home to start up the nightly shouting and slamming of doors. He's alone, and he supposes he is lonely, but it feels like a luxury all the same: for at least the next hour, nobody's going to call him a stupid name or try and trip him or shove him into a wall; nobody's going to yell at him to get out of the room or, even worse, look right through him with their blind, hostile eyes.

When he was a kid, he used to daydream that he was adopted, or that he'd been accidentally switched at the hospital. Some official-looking people would show up and say that they were very sorry but a mistake had been made, and Toshiya had to go and be with his proper family now, who would cuddle him and tell him how much they'd missed him. It's a stupid fantasy, he knows that – with his father's big hands and gangly frame and his mother's delicate face he can't possibly be anything but a Hara – and it's stupid that he still retreats to it sometimes, even when he's far too old to be gathered close by some other family.

It's just that he can't help but feel that his _real_ family is out there somewhere, and that one day he'll find them. There just has to be a group of people out in the world who have been looking and waiting for him in the same way that he's been looking and waiting for them, and when he's with them he won't be different any more, and he won't be lonely any more. They'll live in a big city and they'll wear different clothes and they'll dye their hair, and nobody will laugh at them or say mean things, or if people do say mean things then they won't _care_ , they'll just laugh back twice as loud; they'll pierce their ears and nobody will call them a fag; they'll drink and they'll smoke and they'll take drugs and they'll be young forever, and glorious.

 

He falls asleep thinking about it, his young body a tangle of limbs in a very small space. He sleeps through his mother's arrival home; the clattering of the front door and her quiet, defeated call into the house; when she eases open his bedroom door she sees his school bag and uniform on the floor but no other sign of him, just the hissing sound of a tape that's come to its end. She turns off the cassette player, sighs, and closes her son's bedroom door behind her again. While Toshiya shifts and dreams, she thinks about how her very last son is growing just as out of control as all the others.

Toshiya dreams of stupid, mundane things: school, swimming, trees. Turning shapes resolve themselves into Kaoru's face and arms and lips, and fast asleep Toshiya is falling towards them, turning his own face up to Kaoru's mouth and letting those gentle, careful arms come up around him. He sighs and tries to turn, pressing against the door at the wrong angle; the weak latch swings open and he ends up deposited unceremoniously onto the floor in a heap of sleepy limbs, blinking in confusion, groggy and weak feeling.

Stiffly he pulls himself to his feet, and his half-hard cock bobs between his thighs with his movements. It's grown colder and he shivers as lies himself down on his bedroom floor, flat on his back, his legs spread uncertainly and his hand between them. Biting his lip anxiously, he closes his eyes.

Thinks of Kaoru's hands instead of his; small and delicate and sometimes tattooed, sometimes not. Thinks of those hands on him, moving over his body the way his own are; one of them gently encircling his dick and the other pushing up his chest, stroking over the skin there.

Kaoru would take care of him; he'd make it good. Toshiya knows this because Kaoru has always taken care of him.

There are no lights on and his room is dark, making his body another shifting shadow amongst others; the sun has just set, and the sky outside looks grey and dim but luminous. The trees that stand against it are black.

He wonders how many times he's touched himself in his life. He's pretty sure he was nine when he first figured out how; nine or ten, and – _god_ – he remembers telling Kaoru about it excitedly, offering to show him, because he'd been so sure that he was the only person in the world to discover that his dick could do this awesome thing. He can't remember how Kaoru responded, though; whether the older man forced a laugh and advised him not to go talking about it, or just got embarrassed and changed the subject. Sometimes he thinks its definitely the former and sometimes the latter, depending on how much Kaoru lets him get away with; if he lets Toshiya snuggle up to him or hold his hand.

He still thinks of him as a kid, and it drives Toshiya crazy.

 

He takes a shallow sort of breath as he touches himself, his head filling with the sorts of crazy thoughts that only ever occur to him when he's doing this; like that it would be hot if Kaoru could see him right now, or other things, more intense things that he's not all the way sure about, four-letter-word things. It's at the background of his mind most of the time, shoved down into a dark corner, but as soon as he has his cock in his hand it feels like it all comes rising up to the surface; like that even though he's not entirely sure how it works when two men fuck, he still wants Kaoru to fuck him. Like how sometimes when he's around Kaoru he finds himself wondering what his dick would taste and feel like in his mouth, but when he's touching himself he feels like he _knows_ how it would be, and he wants it.

His cock twitches in his hand, and he grasps it tightly.

The thing is, there are times when he's _sure_ he and Kaoru have done it. There's something about the way the other man gets so shy and uncomfortable with him when he's affectionate; something about the worried way Kaoru looks at him sometimes, and Toshiya wants to ask but he knows Kaoru will never tell him – would refuse, and might even feel angry with him for asking.

But he wants to _know_. He wants to know if in the future he gets what he wants or not; if Kaoru's as turned on by Toshiya as Toshiya is by him. Nervously, he wants to know when it happens – _if_ it happens – so he can be ready.

Thinking about it, his mind passing smoothly over the blurrier details, he cums quickly. There's actual semen, too, which hasn't been happening very long; only for the past year and a half or so. When that started, he at least knew enough to not tell Kaoru about it.

Tiredly he gets to his feet, holding his sticky hand awkwardly aloft and separate from his body; he grabs a tissue and wipes himself off as best he can. Naked, he wanders back over to the window, his eyes performing their same slow scan between the tree trunks and the tangle of roots and branches – only this time he sees it; a flash of pale skin amongst the trees like a little glimmer in the darkness, and a soft shadow of dark hair.

 

He spins around and starts to dress himself roughly, yanking items out of his closet almost at random; he smooths his hair down with hands that shake excitedly. He wonder if he'll still look all flushed and satisfied; if Kaoru will be able to tell what he's just done. Jeans, T-shirt, jacket. There's no time for socks, and there's no way in hell he's braving the gauntlet through the rest of the house in order to grab his shoes from by the door; barefoot, he yanks up the sash window and hooks one long, skinny leg outside of it.

The air is cold. He wriggles his toes. The windowsill presses a little uncomfortably against his still-sensitive crotch and then he's over and out, letting himself drop a few feet and land in an awkward crumple. Scrambling upright, he glances around quickly, his eyes glowing warm and his breath a cloud of white in the dim evening, searching for that beautiful, familiar face and frowning when he can't find it.

Shrugging his jacket more squarely onto his shoulders – it's a hand-me-down, like just about everything else he owns, and much too big – he sets off towards the woodland. The trees start only a few metres from the back of his house, and he remembers how they used to give him nightmares when he was younger; all that darkness. The ground underfoot changes from scratchy grass to compacted earth, fallen leaves and pine needles, and he steps on something sharp; a thorn or something. He doesn't care. His hair whips around his face as he turns wildly in every direction, his eyes struggling to pick out a face in the darkness.

'No shoes, Toshiya?'

That voice, so deep for such a delicately-proportioned person; so _known_ to Toshiya, the ink his very best memories are written in.

He turns around and embraces the older man desperately, inhaling his familiar smell. He remembers a time when Kaoru would have looked so tall and imposing to him, but now they're almost the same height; when he hugs Kaoru it's possible to rest his chin on the other man's shoulder, rather than pressing his face into his chest. He hears Kaoru give a low, warm chuckle; feels warm arms squeezing him gently.

'I knew you'd come,' Toshiya mutters against his ear.

'You did? How?'

Toshiya sighs, burying his face into Kaoru's neck. 'I needed you,' he says.

Or maybe he doesn't say it aloud; he's not sure. He feels it in the tenderness of Kaoru's touch, the deep sigh of breath in the other man's throat; he knows he understands.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Ingénue_ is a soft electronica track by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke's side outfit, Atoms for Peace. It's a really nicely composed bit of music, quite stripped down, and both musically and lyrically it always seems to be very resigned - not so much in a bad way, but just in a sense that certain things are fated to be. I don't know.   
>  Anyway, if you end up looking it up, the music video is top and I love it.


	7. How To Disappear Completely

It's the biggest building he's ever seen.

His mouth makes a sombre little line in his face as he tilts his head as far back as it will go, trying to see all the way up to the roof. The windows are lit up unevenly. Kaoru counts thirty lit ones before he gives up; thirty is as high as he knows. There are more lit ones than not lit ones, though.

He must have done it again, just like that time when he thought he was walking into the bathroom but when he went through the door he came out in a shaggy overgrown field, and there was another little boy there he might have played with, but he had really wanted to go to the bathroom and he didn't know if there was any place around he could pee. He felt panicky, then, and he didn't talk to the other boy; he went off and hid behind a clump of bushes. He remembers that: feeling uncomfortable and worried and the ache in his bladder, but that was a long time ago, that was maybe when he was only _just_ four rather than halfway through being four, like he is now.

He can't remember how he got home. At least he doesn't need to use the bathroom this time.

There hadn't been a door, though; Kaoru's quite sure about that, because just before he was here he was out in the woods with his parents. He had run ahead, that was it – and then something shiny had caught his eye; there was a metal doorknob growing out of the trunk of a tree. And he had taken it, and he had pulled, and the weird thing had happened all over again and dumped him in this strange place where the daytime had turned to night time and instead of being a fresh autumn morning it was all damp and drizzly.

A feeling of heavy foreboding lodges itself in his stomach. Last time this happened his parents were _so angry_ , and now they're going to be angry all over again.

 

He had tried to explain, last time, but because they were angry he was crying, and so it was hard to talk properly. He didn't really have all the words he needed, either.

Slowly, he gives the big building one last long look and then starts to walk, taking uneven steps so he doesn't step on any of the cracks between the paving stones. He's sort of stuck, though, because he's marooned on this city block with a busy road at each end, and Kaoru's not allowed to cross those alone. Sometimes his dad lets him cross without holding on, but that's only on the road in front of their house, which only has their neighbours' cars on it anyway. His mum never lets him cross without holding on, absolutely never-never; she says he's always daydreaming and he doesn't look where he's going, but that's not true. The problem is more like he looks where he's going a bit too much. He gets all caught up in the little tiny details of things, like the cracks in the pavements or the little splotchy bit where the people who painted the white lines on the road made a mistake, or if he's crunching leaves under his shoes and being careful not to step on any little insects. That's because once he stepped on a caterpillar and it was gross, all green and gooey, but when he started thinking about it, it was sad as well, because that caterpillar had probably just been going along thinking all about how it was going to make a cocoon soon, and go inside it and have a long sleep and come out as a big moth like the ones they get on the window screen at night in summer. He's got a picture book about caterpillars, but it's no good; he doesn't understand how you can go to sleep and wake up as something different. Every day when he wakes up he's still the same.

There's a big puddle on the pavement. There are lots of people walking through it, though; ladies in high-heeled shoes and men in shiny shoes like his dad wears for work. He wants to go in the middle of it and splash, but there are too many grown-ups all over the place; they're getting in the way, and maybe they'd be cross with him for splashing without having his boots on. There are rules for everything when you start getting older.

 

Because he can't go one way and he can't go the other way, Kaoru finds a step to sit down on and rests his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hand. It was interesting, the door handle being all stuck in the tree like that, but this bit is annoying. He's getting cold and his hair is getting wet, and he's hungry as well.

There are a lot of people walking around, but for some reason, two of them catch his eye. They're dressed funny and they have weird hair: he's never seen people like that before. They're coming towards him, talking amongst themselves; one of them is short and the other one is tall, and the short one has hair that's yellow and bits of metal in his face, and the tall one is confusing because he's a boy, but he's pretty like a girl. He's got long hair like a girl, too, and his clothes are funny, sort of drapey and raggedy, and he's got a big case that's shaped like a guitar which he's wearing on his back like a snail shell. They're not very old compared to everybody else on the streets, and they seem to be arguing about something, but not in a way that's really serious; the dark haired one is laughing and he gives a little shove to the yellow haired one next to him.

With the laugh still on his face, he catches Kaoru's curious stare. His smile turns a bit warmer and gentler, and he sort of raises a hand like he's saying hello. Kaoru bows, even though it's difficult sitting down.

That's all that happens, and then the two men have swept by him; they're still horsing around down the road, the short one reaching up to ruffle the other one's dark hair. They cross the street and then they start going down some steps that lead into a big square hole all lit up with yellow light. The sign above it has words Kaoru can't read, but there's also a little picture of a train. Maybe the dark haired man can still feel Kaoru's eyes on him, because just before he goes completely out of sight he turns back to look at him. His eyes have a funny sort of look in them, like he's trying to work something out, but then the yellow haired man grabs his arm and pulls him away, and they're both gone.

 

After that, Kaoru sits still for a little while. Thirty cars go past him, and then even more. He decides that if the two men come back, he's going to ask them why they've got such funny clothes and hair, and he's going to ask the dark haired one if he's got an actual real guitar in the case he's carrying, and if so, if he'll show it to him, or maybe even let him run his fingers over the strings to see if he can make a tune from it. He has a toy guitar, a small one, but it's not the same; it's too high pitched and the notes don't come out right. That drives Kaoru crazy, the way it does when his parents sing along to music on the radio, because their voices all slip around and neither of them land on the notes they're supposed to land on.

The rain is coming down harder now, and reluctantly he gets to his feet. He supposes he's going to have to try to cross the road, even if it is bad, because it's dark and it's cold and he wants to go home. The longer he's gone the more angry his parents will be, and he'll try to explain but it'll all go wrong again; he knows it.

The thing is, he sometimes gets the weird feeling that he's not just travelling in space; sometimes, it feels like he's moved through time, as well. Sometimes there are machines that he doesn't recognise, and sometimes people are wearing old fashioned clothes and they don't have mobile phones, and sometimes not even cars, and there are shops on the streets but there aren't any Rift Bars. On the other side of this street, there's a glass box with a big telephone in it, and somebody is inside having a conversation; Kaoru's never seen anything like _that_.

When he gets to the road, he has a good look at the adults who are standing around waiting to cross it. None of them look quite right, but there's a lady who at least looks like she might be the same age as his mother, so Kaoru stands next to her and holds her hand to cross, but she pulls it away and gives him a funny look.

There's a babble then, and a lot more of the adults are suddenly looking at him. Kaoru feels himself shrinking, like he wants to slide through the cracks in the pavement. The lady takes hold of his shoulders and squats down in front of him so they're eye to eye, which Kaoru doesn't like; he puts his hands in front of his face so she can't look at him so hard.

'It's okay,' she's saying in a crooning sort of voice, 'It's okay, are you lost? Where are your parents?'

Somebody else says, 'He's homeless,' which is a big lie.

'No, I don't think he is. Look, he's too neat. He must be lost.'

'His parents must be out of their minds with worry.'

'Should we call the police?'

That's something to make him panic, because Kaoru's dad is a policeman and he knows exactly what policemen do: they lock all the bad people away.

'I'm not bad,' he says quickly.

The grown-ups are all looking at him in a horrible fixed way that makes his skin feel prickly and his voice sound small and his legs feel wobbly. He feels a sort of hot feeling in his eyes and nose even though boys don't cry. He wants his mother, and he wants his dad, and he wants to be safe at home with nobody angry with him or staring at him or getting upset. He rubs his small hands over his face, feeling overwhelmed, and he's ashamed that he can feel tears underneath his palms. The grown-ups are still asking him questions, but it's all a meaningless babble because they're all talking at once, _where are your parents what's your name how old are you do you know your address?_

He wants his mother to rub his back and cuddle him close like he's a really small baby again. He wants to take a bath with his dad, and play with the plastic boats whilst his dad pretends to be a whale, spouting water out of his mouth like he has a blowhole, or makes believe that he's a shark snapping at Kaoru's ankles.

Somebody is wrapping a coat around his shoulders, now, and they're steering him away from the direction he was walking in, away from the road, and instead they're taking him into a brightly lit noodle restaurant. It's very clean inside, with a big shiny wooden counter, and Kaoru wants to sit on one of the tall chairs but it's too high for him. He makes a little jumping bounce, and somebody says, 'I think he has to go to the bathroom.' It's not true, but somebody is already guiding him towards the toilet, and right there he sees it – the brass doorknob, familiar as an old friend on the bathroom door.

The adults are talking about telephoning the police again, and Kaoru quickly slips back into the stream of time.

 

He was right about one thing: his parents are angry. He comes out in the same sun-dappled forest the three of them were walking in, and he finds his parents shouting out his name in a two-tone sort of way, _Kao-_ ru, and his mother crying in an ugly way with her face very wet and red. They drive home in furious silence, and Kaoru kicks the back of the passenger seat to distract himself from the urge to cry, which is blowing up inside of him like a balloon.

When they get back to their small apartment, his mum and dad sit him down in the living room and ask him to explain to them very clearly why he disappeared for so long. He takes a deep breath, feeling his vision going all blurry just at the disappointed looks on their faces, and tries to clear his throat.

'There was a doorknob in the tree,' he says. His parents exchange a funny sort of glance, and his mother presses her fingertips to her temples.

'It's very important to tell the truth,' Kaoru's dad says gently, which makes Kaoru feel helpless because he's already telling the truth, but they don't believe him.

'I was in a city,' he says. 'I saw a man with yellow hair.'

His mother leans forward and places her palm on his forehead, like she does when she thinks he has a fever. His father inclines his head towards her and mutters, 'Maybe he thought the visitor's centre was an apartment building.'

'No,' Kaoru says stubbornly, 'A real city. With skyscratchers.'

'Skyscrapers,' his father corrects him automatically; his mother doesn't say anything, she just makes a soft sort of moaning noise, which makes Kaoru nervous and also very ashamed. He already knows that every time he disappears she's worried that he won't come back, or that he's been taken by bad people, although he has no idea what bad people would want with a little kid like him; he's not even allowed to stay up late on weekends.

'This has to stop,' she says in a choked-up sort of voice, 'This... _vanishing_. What do we have to _do_ , Kaoru? Do we have to lock you in your room?'

He can't find the words to tell her that wouldn't work. If the brass doorknob can come out of a tree then it can probably come out of a wall, too. He just shakes his head, though, feeling horribly guilty.

'I'm sorry,' he says in a small voice. His mother gives a big sigh.

'Were you hiding?' she asks, 'Behind the trees? Did you hear us yelling for you?'

'I was in a city,' Kaoru says, his face feeling hot.

'Don't _lie_ to me.'

'I'm not lying!'

'How would you have ended up in a city, Kaoru? Tell me that! How?'

'Namie—' Kaoru's father says, reaching out for her in a soothing sort of way, but she shakes him off. She leans forward and takes hold of both Kaoru's hands in hers, staring straight into his face as he squirms.

'Tell me the truth,' she says in a calmer voice.

'But it _is_ true,' Kaoru says, feeling stupid because he's crying just like a little baby would. He can't even scrub the tears out of his eyes because his mum has hold of his hands. 'There was a handle on the tree.'

'A handle.'

'A door handle.' He looks up at her through eyelashes that have separated into damp spikes. He can't stop sniffing, and at last she lets one of his hands go so he can wipe his face. 'Kaoru,' she says in a very gentle voice, 'I promise we won't get angrier with you if you tell us the truth. We both just want to understand what's happening, and make sure that we can keep you safe.'

He feels defeated, because they'll never believe him, and the way they're looking at each other over the top of his head is a very adult way, like they're worried about something they're too scared to say. He clamps his mouth shut and shakes his head, and watches as two fat tears plop onto his lap. There's a quiet that seems to last forever, and then Kaoru's mum sighs.

'No toys,' she says in a flat sort of voice, 'No comics. No television. Not until you can tell your father and I the truth. I've _had_ it, Kaoru. I've had enough.'

She starts crying again and Kaoru's dad sends him to his room.

 

For Kaoru, four and a half years old, the real punishment comes later, lying wide awake in his bed and listening to his parents arguing downstairs, fighting about him. Not playful fighting, the way the two funny-looking men were; real fighting, with harsh words.

Kaoru's mother wants to send him to a head doctor.

Kaoru's father thinks that's crazy. All kids push their boundaries; all kids tell lies.

Kaoru sees, in the glow of his night light, that the handle on his door has changed; the usual curved handle with the Spider Man sticker has changed into a round brass doorknob.

He buries his head under the covers and pretends not to see.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _How To Disappear Completely (And Never Be Found)_ is a Radiohead song from their 2000 album _Kid A_. To date I feel, along with _Amnesiac_ (which was recorded, by and large, in the same sessions) that it's their best and strongest album. _How To Disappear Completely_ has always stuck out to be because of a lyric that seems to have stayed in my head ever since I first heard it: 'I'm not here, this isn't happening.' This felt quite appropriate for Kaoru in this chapter, to me.


	8. Arisen My Senses

Kaoru takes a deep lungful of air and steps out into a bright, clear day that smells of early summer.

The air is still, and he's surrounded by trees; tall, thin trees that point at the sky like arrows on all sides. He can smell their warm sap. The grass he's standing on is ankle high.

He's been here before, many times, and he glances around, looking for Toshiya. The day feels too quiet for him to be anywhere nearby so Kaoru starts to walk, choosing a direction at random and sticking with it completely; he has learnt that it's best to follow his instinct in these situations. His route takes him out of the shaggy field and down a cobbled stone path, which becomes an alleyway between houses; he comes out of there onto a road and suddenly the world is thick with people: teenage boys in identical back gakuran, most with the jackets unbuttoned or shucked off under the gentle sun. They're in groups or couples, laughing and horsing around in the golden-coloured light – the after school light that Kaoru always loved – and it's not easy to spot Toshiya among them even though he's walking alone, straight and jagged as a knife, with his long hair in need of a cut and his uniform somehow shabbier than all the rest; walking fast, his hands jammed protectively into his pockets, he gives off a general air of neglect. He's tall, too; taller than most anybody else. He's finally reached the height Kaoru promised him when he was six.

 

It's funny, somehow, seeing Toshiya in a big crowd like that: Kaoru can't put his finger on why, but it's not exactly a comfortable feeling. Toshiya looks so alone, his posture so proud and sad, as if he doesn't care; Kaoru follows him at a reasonable distance, fascinated, and sees as a cruel hand shoots out of a big group of boys as they pass, shoving Toshiya into a waist-high wall so he rubs his hip and scowls. They're too far ahead for Kaoru to be able to hear what Toshiya says, but he can catch the jeering laughter he gets in response, and begins to quicken his step. The general crowd of uniforms is thinning as the students peel off down their individual streets home; in this small town there aren't many different roads to take. Toshiya takes an unpopular left fork that heads uphill and Kaoru is discomfited to see the group follow him, closing ranks around him; one slips an arm around his neck but it doesn't look friendly. Kaoru feels a muscle tighten in his jaw; he's getting close enough to hear them now.

'Hey _Toshiya_ , where are you going? Is the gay bar open this early?'

Toshiya doesn't reply, but he's walking faster, and as Kaoru draws closer he can see the rigid set of his shoulders.

'Hey _Toshiya_ , how's your _dad_? Are you gonna tell us what he's in prison for yet? Hey, don't you think you should get a fucking _haircut_?'

Kaoru's almost in a run now, but the group of boys are ahead; they catch up with Toshiya and one of them grabs him by the shoulder, forcing him to stumble around to face them. He says something too quietly for Kaoru to quite make it out, but the group breaks up in laughter. One of them grabs hold of Toshiya by the hair and yanks his head back, and he sees a flash in the summer sunlight; a pair of metal scissors winking in the afternoon light.

' _Stop_ it,' Kaoru says, horrified; his voice echoes off the still buildings and the group turns as one, already letting Toshiya go; he rubs his head resentfully where his hair was pulled. 'You kids. What the hell do you think you're doing?'

They stand back, shuffling their feet; these small-town teenagers are hardly hardened delinquents. They're taught to respect their elders, around here; even if some of them are taller than Kaoru, they eye him apprehensively.

'Get out of here,' Kaoru says, uncomfortable with the authority, and quietly they peel away, heading back the way they came. Up ahead, the three boys that look like brothers haven't even turned around.

There's a silence between him and Toshiya, then; Toshiya tucks his hair behind his ear and straightens his uniform. Up close, he looks too thin. He's maybe fifteen or sixteen or so.

 

'Hi,' he says at last, his fingers toying with the buttons on his jacket, and Kaoru nods awkwardly.

'Hi.' He jerks his head at the direction the boys have gone: 'That a bad thing to do? Are they going to be angrier tomorrow?'

Toshiya shrugged. 'Nah. Doesn't matter. Thanks.' He gives Kaoru a self-conscious smile, plucking at his uniform jacket, 'I'd rather you weren't seeing me like this.'

'Like what?'

'In my school uniform, with people like...' he sighed, cocking his head to the side, 'Can we just forget any of that happened, so you can still think I'm cool?'

'You're cool,' Kaoru says comfortably. They fall into step together, carrying on back towards Toshiya's home, and Toshiya smiles.

'It's really good to see you.'

'Good to see you too, kid.'

'You don't get to call me _kid_ any more. I'm fifteen.'

'A real grown up.'

'Talking grown-up shit.' Toshiya knocks his hip against Kaoru's, grinning. It's a weird blur, for a moment, that Kaoru instantly feels guilty for: the last time he saw Toshiya, he was twenty-two years old and lying on his back on his bed, propped up on his elbows, one hand moving lazily over his cock. Kaoru shakes his head, trying to clear the image.

'Those guys hassle you often?' he asks, hoping he sounds casual, and Toshiya twists a lock of his hair around his fingers. It really does need cutting; it's ragged at the ends.

'They're idiots,' he says listlessly, 'It doesn't matter.' He shoots Kaoru a quick sideways glance, 'How old are you?'

'It _does_ matter. Were they really going to cut your hair?'

Toshiya gives a sulky shrug. 'I don't know. I don't want to talk about it.'

'Tough. I do. Have they ever hurt you?'

'They mostly just say dumb stuff. It _really_ doesn't matter. I only have a few years left and then I'm done.'

'Done?'

'With school. With this whole _place_.' He kicks out suddenly at a rock; it clatters as it bounces down the road in front of them. 'As soon as I can, I'm moving somewhere that stays open all night. I kind of – I thought I might move to Osaka, actually.'

'Why Osaka, particularly?' Kaoru asks, and Toshiya gives his head a shy shake.

'Because _you_ live there.'

'Well yeah, but I don't move there until 2041. You might be waiting a while if you want to hang out.'

Toshiya grins, runs a hand through his shaggy, too long, beautiful hair. 'I know, but it'll be like I know somebody anyway. I'll be able to walk on the streets and think that maybe you're walking in the same spot, a few years later than me.' He pauses. 'You know, since knowing you, time doesn't really feel the same. My life...feels like part of your life.'

'You get your own life, Toshiya. A whole one.'

'I know.' He rounds an unexpected corner and reaches up to brush the branches of a tree with one long, skinny arm, a reach Kaoru might only be able to make by jumping, 'But don't you get it? You're here, and you're there. And I'm here all the time, but you take me with you when you go.'

'I don't understand,' Kaoru says, and Toshiya flashes him a coy sort of smile.

'You don't think about me when you're in the future?' he asks.

'Of course I do. I think about you all the time. I used to try to avoid opening the doors when I saw them, as much as I could.' Kaoru pauses. 'Since meeting you, I open all of them.'

'So you take me with you,' Toshiya says, as if he's explaining it to an idiot. He grins at Kaoru and takes his hand, starting to pull him along.

 

Toshiya takes him to the narrow, dark sort of house where he now lives with his grandmother. She's not in, he explains; every Tuesday is her mah-jong afternoon with her friends further down in the village. They have the whole place to themselves, he says, and slips Kaoru another coy sort of grin; the type of smile that makes him feel slightly uncomfortable.

'Do you like living here?' he asks, and Toshiya gives a loose shrug.

'It's okay. My grandma is pretty strict, but it's better than before.' He gives Kaoru a narrow, assessing sort of look. 'You want a beer?' he asks bluntly.

'Excuse me?'

Toshiya rolls his eyes and starts up the stairs, Kaoru tagging along behind him uncertainly. The staircase is steep and the stairs are made of dark brown wood that creaks; at the top there's a tiny landing splitting off into three rooms. Toshiya checks the handle of one of the doors carefully before pushing it open and ushering Kaoru through. He closes the door behind them.

'This is my room,' he says unnecessarily. The walls are covered in posters that look like they've been ripped out of magazines: all singers and bands, no actors or pin-ups. Apart from the futon on the floor and the wardrobe, the only other furniture is a second- or third-hand looking chest of drawers with its top entirely given over to a tape deck. Orange crates full of cassettes line the walls, and the curtain at the window is heavy, dusty black. At some point Toshiya seems to have haphazardly wrapped a red shawl around the light fitting hanging from the ceiling, so when he flicks the light on, the room instantly glows red. Kaoru raises his eyebrows, and Toshiya looks up at it pensively.

'Red is the colour of energy,' he says, and heads over to his wardrobe. He opens it and Kaoru has to bite back a smile; inside, it's pure chaos, with clothes falling off hangers and tangled all over the floor. He digs unselfconsciously through the pile and somehow comes up with two bottles of beer, one of which he throws to Kaoru. The other, he opens in a practised sort of way on the edge of his chest of drawers, adding another shallow white nick to the golden-varnished wood. He takes a big swallow from it, wrinkling his nose, and punches a button on the tape deck. The sound of David Bowie singing _Rebel Rebel_ fills the room: _you've got your mother in a whirl, she's not sure if you're a boy or a girl..._

'You're sort of young for beer,' Kaoru says, trying to hide his amusement. 'I feel like I'm being a bad adult if I don't tell you off at least a little.'

'How old are you, this time?'

'I'm twenty six.'

'You were twenty six last time I saw you.'

'Last time I saw you, you were twenty two.'

'Yeah?' Toshiya smiles. 'What was I doing? Was I living in Osaka?'

Kaoru's insides give another guilty lurch, and he opens his beer the same way Toshiya did. 'I don't want to give the game away,' he says gently. 'It's better if you live it first.'

 

Toshiya nods at that, leaning back against the chest of drawers. 'So you're eleven years older than me,' he clarifies.

He's giving Kaoru a look that makes him nervous. He nods uncertainly.

'That's right.'

'You know...you really helped me, before. When my parents were – you know.' He smiles shyly, 'And today. You're _always_ helping me. So I had to think about some way of paying you back. But I don't know what to give to a twenty-first century guy.'

'You don't have to pay me back,' Kaoru says carefully, and Toshiya's smile widens. He closes the distance between them and runs a clumsy hand down Kaoru's chest.

'Woah,' Kaoru says hurriedly, grasping at Toshiya's wrist to stop it from going any lower, and Toshiya blushes furiously.

'So I – I thought I could offer you me,' he says, less confident sounding now, and Kaoru gently guides his wrist back to his side.

'Toshiya,' he says, as kindly as he can with his body feeling as tense as it does, 'You don't need to do anything. You _definitely_ don't need to do anything like that.'

'But I...' he doesn't seem able to meet Kaoru's eyes, and his cheeks are so flushed hot red, 'I like you.'

'Toshiya—'

'I'm not too young, or anything. I know how it all works.'

' _Toshiya_ ,' Kaoru says more firmly, and Toshiya takes a step back. His eyes keep touching on Kaoru's and then flicking away nervously; slowly he moves his shaking fingers up to his white uniform shirt and begins to unbutton it.

' _Stop_ ,' Kaoru says, and Toshiya gives him an unreadable look.

'Don't you want me?' he asks softly. His eyes brighten momentarily as Kaoru walks forward and takes hold of his shirt, but the light in them dies as the older man's hands begin to redo his buttons, covering up the patch of chest where his heart beats wildly. Kaoru's hands tremble slightly and fumble the job, and he grits his teeth. There's a warm flush of arousal in his stomach that he's forcing himself to keep down, reminding himself viciously that Toshiya's just a teenager, just a _kid_ , fifteen years old and vulnerable even if he is beautiful.

 _Don't let this be how it happens_ , he begs wildly in his head, _don't let me betray him, please_.

'Toshiya,' he says, more steadily than he feels, 'It's not about that. Even if you know how things work, you're still much, much too young.'

'Do we do it when I'm older?' Toshiya asks bluntly, and Kaoru closes his eyes for something longer than a blink.

'Toshiya, I can't answer that. All I can tell you for sure is that we're definitely not doing anything today.'

 

Sighing, Toshiya gives a small nod. Apparently for something to do, he drinks down more of his beer.

'I'm pretty sure I'm gay,' he says, like it's a natural extension of what's happened. 'I think some girls are pretty, but I don't want to kiss them or touch them or anything. And I think about guys when I...' he makes a sad hand gesture and Kaoru nods hurriedly, trying not to think about what he's saying too much; stupidly, he can feel a blush spreading through his cheeks.

'That's okay,' he says clumsily, easing himself down onto the floor; much more gracefully, Toshiya sits down next to him. For a moment the two of them simply drink in silence, Toshiya clinking their bottles companionably. Kaoru starts edging his thumbnail under the label on the front of his. 'It's okay to like guys,' he says carefully. 'You know it's normal and there's – nothing wrong with it, or anything?'

Toshiya shrugs artlessly, and Kaoru works harder at the label on his bottle. 'Please be careful, though,' he says quietly. 'The world is changing – it _will_ change – but you live in a comparatively backward time, and you have to be on your guard.'

Looking unimpressed, Toshiya leans back on his hands. 'Didn't you see them earlier?' he asks bluntly. 'Everybody around here has already decided what they think of me.'

'But it's not just that, Toshiya. I don't want you to get hurt; seriously hurt, I mean.'

'Can I have a cigarette?'

'You're too young for cigarettes.'

Toshiya makes an offended sort of noise, but not like he really cares. Leaning back the way he is, he looks tired. He sort of nudges Kaoru, and then rests his head on the older man's shoulder.

'Kiss me,' he mumbles, and Kaoru laughs even though he feels like there's a pain in his chest.

'C'mon, Toshiya. You're fifteen. Your hormones are going mad.'

'It's not my _hormones_. Are you really that stupid?'

'Toshiya—'

'I _love_ you. I don't care if I'm too young. I feel like I've been in love with you my whole life, and it's driving me crazy. There has to be a reason why I see you everywhere, Kaoru, don't you get that?'

'Toshiya...' Kaoru stares at him helplessly, his heart beating faster in spite of himself; Toshiya's face is much too close to his. The teenager looks determined, stubborn, and even though it's inappropriate Kaoru can't help but feel that he's seeing his true beauty at last, much more so than in his long honey-coloured limbs or his deep brown eyes or his smile – the real beauty of him is in his tenacity; his sheer wilfulness; his determination to win at any cost, just by wanting it the most. It wasn't competitiveness exactly, it was more like a type of fierceness, or a rage – some great rage to survive, no matter what. 'Toshiya,' Kaoru says again weakly, the familiar fondness tugging at his heart so hard that it hurts, 'I can't do this.'

'Just a kiss,' Toshiya says, speaking quickly and quietly because he can sense that he's winning, 'Just one kiss. That's all I need.'

'Toshiya—'

'I want you to be my first,' the teenager blurts, flushing furiously.

'Toshiya,' Kaoru says, gentler, 'Your first—?'

'My first kiss. First blow job. First time having sex. All of it.' He pauses, swallowing, his eyes nervous but excited, 'I want all of it with you.'

'No.' Kaoru won't meet his eyes. He's looking down at his knees, and his usually stoic face is strangely miserable as he shakes his head, 'Toshiya, don't. Please.'

'I already do,' Toshiya says. He takes Kaoru's hand and the older man doesn't resist but he does close his eyes tightly, refusing to look at it.

'Toshiya,' he says in a ragged sort of voice, 'Please. Please don't tempt me too much.'

Toshiya bites his lip, looking down at the small, tattooed hand nestled against his own. He feels like his own indecision is a pitiful thing: on one hand, he can tell that Kaoru is cracking, and it makes him feel more excited than he can really cope with. On the other hand, he can't understand why Kaoru looks so upset; so almost _frightened_ of him and of the way they're touching. Hesitantly, Toshiya tries pulling Kaoru's hand towards his body, and the older man makes a strangled sort of noise and yanks his fingers away.

'Kaoru,' Toshiya says, gentler, 'Kaoru, you don't need to worry. Not about... _corrupting_ me or anything like that. I already – I mean, I know I want it. I...I think about it. I think about you all the time.'

 

Kaoru just makes a sort of sighing sound. He still won't look at him; he actually has his eyes squeezed shut, and carefully, Toshiya leans forward and knocks their foreheads lightly together. 'Just a kiss,' he says quietly, 'Just a kiss and that's all, and I'll leave it, I promise. Just one kiss. Please.'

Their faces are so close anyway, their foreheads together – that strange gesture; so distinctly Toshiya – and their lips no more than an inch or two apart. Still, it's a surprise when Kaoru butts his head upwards just gently, closing the gap even with his every moment heavy with regret: the way he brushes Toshiya's lips with his, the way he slides one hand into the warm hair over the back of Toshiya's neck. It's a soft, careful kiss that doesn't dare much, but Toshiya can feel the shape of Kaoru's lips – that precise little curve he has in his upper lip that always reminds Toshiya of a letter M – pressing so sadly against his own, and the high fast rhythm of his nervous breathing, and he can smell his skin and feel the heat of it through his clothes.

He knows that whatever happens, Kaoru has lost – that he _has_ to lose, because in that forbidden first kiss, Toshiya has felt something change inside of him, like something new clicking into place; he knows that with this man's lips against his, he has made himself Kaoru's forever.

This is all he'll ever want. Nobody else will do.

The contact between them breaks as Kaoru scrambles to his feet, his eyes looking reddish and a horrified, almost terrified sort of expression on his face.

'I – I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Toshiya.'

His voice shakes. He casts a last miserable, apologetic look at Toshiya before he leaves, and the teenager leans his head back against the wall and sighs deeply. He can still feel those lips on his, and even though he's got a sick feeling inside him like he's messed everything up, he can't help it: he smiles.

He gets up and he turns the volume on the cassette player up to full.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Arisen My Senses_ is the opening track on Bjork's most recent album, _Utopia_. Full disclosure: I love Bjork so much that sometimes I get emotional just thinking about it. _Arisen My Senses_ is essentially a song that - to me - is all about the feeling of falling in love. 
> 
> For me, and sorry to get personal, it's irrevocably linked in my head with a particular memory I have of my (now) boyfriend running towards me through some woodland. I was sitting on a swing that was hanging from a tree in the middle of an ancient oak forest, and suddenly I felt like I was looking at him through the wrong end of the telescope: everything about him looked ultra ultra clear and defined and sharp, like life just slid into super-high definition. We weren't together then, but I was filled with this incredibly strong feeling of 'I love you'. I won't go into it, but suffice to say...he felt the same. For me though, this track is completely euphoric. It's the sound of falling in love! 
> 
> Some admin: this will be the **last update until, I would guess, the weekend after next**. Sorry to anyone following this! I'm away next week. If anybody is following _Maps_ too, there'll be a _Maps_ update before I go as well.


	9. My Heart's Not In It

It's raining.

'Get him into bed,' somebody's laughing, and there's a soft voice in his ear: 'Toshiya – your keys.'

' _Your_ keys,' Toshiya slurs nonsensically, and he feels more than hears a sigh against his cheek.

He's sagging between two sets of arms, grinning loosely with his eyes closed; already when he thinks back on his birthday party, all he can remember is a dark whirl of faces and of laughter; dancing, sweat, beer, shots, fruity drinks and bitter drinks and drinks so strong they made him cough. Spilled drinks, sticky drinks; the taste of them all is clinging to his lips when he licks them, and he feels a gentle hand fishing around in the tight pocket of his jeans.

'Hold still,' a familiar voice says, still very close to him. He makes the effort to pry his eyes open and swat the hand away, but he finds it's Kyo, sending a level, solemn sort of look into his face whilst hunting over his body for his keys. He finds them at last in the back pocket of his jeans, and unlocks the door with a little huff of relief.

The floor underneath Toshiya's feet moves – or wait – no, he's being moved. He's guided through the doorway of the apartment he's shared with Kyo for the past three years, and he looks to see who has his other arm and it's Die, long red hair swaying distractingly around his shoulders. Gratefully, Toshiya leans against him, and Die laughs; he holds Toshiya up as Kyo kneels on the floor and takes off his shoes. Together, they deposit him on his bed, and Die steps back, stretching out his arms.

'For a skinny guy, he gets heavy after a while.'

'Yes,' Kyo says shortly; he's been in a strange sort of mood all night. 'Are you going back to the party?'

'Course,' Die says easily, 'You coming?'

'No, I'm going to keep an eye on him.'

'Oh, right. You going to be okay?' Die looks like he's concentrating hard.

'We'll be fine.'

'I mean you won't...' Die hiccups, 'Won't let him choke on his own puke or anything, yeah?'

'No, I won't let him choke on his own puke.'

'Okay.' Die blinks, tries to focus. 'Okay, but—'

'Just go, Die,' Kyo says tiredly, 'I want to go to bed.'

Unperturbed by his hostile tone, Die sweeps the small man up into a bone-breaking hug and, releasing him, leans over the bed to drop a smacking kiss on Toshiya's flushed cheek.

'Happy birthday, grown-up,' he slurs, his hair tickling Toshiya's face, 'Sleep it off.'

Toshiya flaps an arm and groans.

 

The next thing he knows the apartment is quiet and dark. He's still lying in the same position and he has his clothes on, and it doesn't feel like very much time has passed. There's water running in the bathroom, and clumsily Toshiya pulls himself upright. His vision swims gently before his eyes, but he blinks until it resolves itself into a series of mostly stationary shapes. Experimentally he gets to his feet, and it's not too bad; by brushing his fingers along the wall he's able to negotiate his way back to the door – the place is so small that it's only a matter of five or six steps – and bend down to start trying to push his feet back into his shoes.

The door to their cold, draughty little bathroom opens with a snap and Kyo stands there in a pair of loose pants that cling to his hipbones, a towel looped around his shoulders and his hair sticking to his face damply. He pushes it back, frowning.

'What the hell are you doing?' he asks, his voice clear and brittle-sounding.

'We said we'd watch the sun rise,' Toshiya says, wobbling and nearly falling; he catches himself on the door, which opens and nearly dumps him out in the hall. Concentrating hard, he shuts it again and continues trying to force his shoes onto his feet.

'We did say that,' Kyo says suspiciously, 'But you're very, very drunk.'

'I'm not _that_ —'

'Yes, you are.'

'Where's everybody else?' Toshiya asks, and Kyo sighs.

'They're all still out.'

'But – Die—?'

'He's with them.'

'He was _here_.'

'I know. He had to help me get you home.'

There's a silence in which Toshiya finally gets his foot in his shoe, but it's the wrong one. Sighing, he slides to the floor and pulls it off again; puts it on the correct foot this time.

'I want to watch the sun rise,' he says. 'It's the only twentieth birthday I'm ever going to have.'

'It's raining.'

'Not that much.' Toshiya looks up at his friend, smiling.

'You won't be able to see anything.'

'I'm going up on the roof,' Toshiya says decisively. 'You don't have to come with me.'

Kyo makes a quiet groaning noise, rubbing his hands over his face tiredly. But he starts to rifle through his bundle of cast-off clothing for a sweater, and he helps Toshiya with his other shoe.

 

Toshiya's been up on the roof only a handful of times, mostly in the months after they first moved in. They're not supposed to go up there, but the padlock has been broken for as long as they've been living there.

Theirs isn't a particularly tall building but it is at least taller than its neighbours; it rises to seven storeys and from the roof they can see the Tsutenkaku Tower. It's lit up, but the sky behind it is more of a blue than a black. Kyo won't let Toshiya sit on the little lip of a wall that runs around the roof, so he sits down right in the middle of the space even though there are puddles; he feels the rainwater soak through his jeans and starts to shiver.

'You're an idiot,' Kyo says sourly, but he sits down beside him. They watch and wait awhile as the sky slowly, slowly starts to lighten.

'Remember when I first moved in here?' Toshiya asks suddenly.

'Yeah.'

'You said it was only gonna be for six months. Or...or one day.'

'Yes.'

Toshiya gazes up at the sky dreamily. 'I like living here,' he says decisively, and Kyo snorts.

'It's the worst neighbourhood in Osaka.'

'Yeah,' Toshiya agrees. He leans back on his hands and sighs softly, gazing up at the sky. It's more of a blue grey, now. There's a long silence.

' _He_ couldn't come tonight, then?' Kyo asks finally, his voice gentler than it normally is when he talks about Kaoru, and Toshiya gives his head a small shake.

'No.'

He glances over at Kyo in time to see his lips firm, and he shakes his head harder, 'Don't start.'

'No, I think I will start,' Kyo says tightly. 'How long do you plan to let this go on, anyway?'

Toshiya's only answer is a long groan, tipping his head right back, and he feels Kyo glare at him.

'He's treating you like shit,' the shorter man says artlessly.

'No, he's not.'

'Yes, he is. It's your fucking _birthday_ and he couldn't be bothered to be here?'

'It's not that.'

'Then _what_? Is he not interested in you now that you're an actual, you know, _adult_?'

The look Toshiya gives Kyo is unusually cold, out of character for him. 'That is not fair,' he says, his voice quiet but firm.

'None of this is fair, and I'm sick of it.'

'Lucky that it's none of your business, then,' Toshiya says.

'When he's making you miserable, it's my business,' Kyo argues staunchly.

'I'm _not_ miserable.'

'You _are_ ,' Kyo says, more forcefully than he intended; Toshiya flinches back slightly. There's an uncomfortable quiet between them. It's still drizzling slightly, and there's no visible horizon, and the sky is pale blue and soft with cloud. They don't have a chance of seeing the sun come up, but they both continue to sit there, getting wet.

'How old is he?' Kyo asks after a long moment. 'He's...I mean, he's _older_. Much older than you.'

'Does it matter,' Toshiya says listlessly.

'How did you meet him?' Kyo asks next, his jaw set stubbornly, and Toshiya directs a wan smile down at his hands.

'I've known him since I was six years old.'

'Since you were _six_?'

Toshiya nods.

'He's from Nagano too?'

Toshiya shakes his head.

'No, he's not from Nagano. I just know him from then, that's all.'

'That's fucking creepy,' Kyo spits decisively. 'So he, what, he watched you _grow up_ and now he just appears every now and again and fucks you? He's known you since you were six and you don't even have his phone number, or his address?'

There's another long, long silence, because of course Toshiya doesn't have either of those things: Kaoru's apartment most likely has somebody else living in it currently, if it's even been built at all, and knowing Kaoru's phone number would be pointless: you can't call the future, not even when you feel like you'd give everything in the world to be able to do so. Just for a minute.

 

'You don't understand,' Toshiya says at last, his voice strained, 'But I need you to try and trust me with this. It's just that – just, he can't be here all the time.'

'But Toshiya—'

' _Trust_ me, I said.' Toshiya looks at his friend, his eyes large and dark and soft; begging eyes. 'Please trust me. Please _believe_ me. He has a good reason.' He pauses. 'I've never lied to you,' he reminds him gently.

Kyo bites his lip, looks down at his hands.

'I'm worried that he doesn't have a good reason,' he confesses, 'And that you're not seeing it.'

'Why wouldn't I be seeing it?' Toshiya asks patiently, and Kyo sighs.

'Because you're naïve,' he mumbles, 'And because you have a trusting nature, which makes you easy to be taken advantage of.'

Toshiya smiles a little bitterly. 'I'm not as dumb as I look,' he says softly.

'It's nothing to do with being dumb.'

'Yes it is. You think I've been taken in by some stupid story, but I haven't. He's not taking advantage of me, Kyo, I promise.'

Kyo sighs, his breath a plume of white in the early morning cold; it doesn't feel like the first day of April.

'I can't think of a good enough excuse,' he admits, 'To make it all right. I feel like I've gone through every possibility, and none of them are good enough, and he apparently has one but you can't tell me what it is. There's something that makes it okay for him to roll in whenever he feels like it, fuck the shit out of you, and then vanish without a trace for weeks on end, without you hearing a single word from him? How am I supposed to believe something like that?'

'You're supposed to believe it because I'm telling you,' Toshiya says, shooting Kyo a disappointed sort of look. He hesitates, staring down at his hands, 'I wish I could explain it, but I can't.'

'Because it's a secret,' Kyo says mockingly.

'That's right,' Toshiya says levelly. He catches the look on Kyo's face and sighs, leaning his cheek against his friend's shoulder. 'Trust me,' he says again, and woodenly, Kyo puts an arm around him.

 

They sit out until the sky is a uniform grey-white, and then they stand to go. The sun isn't visible, but the lights on the tower have been turned off, and more of the residential buildings around them are showing little yellow squares of window, shadows moving behind them where people are starting to get up and get ready for their day.

Toshiya totters slightly down the steps, and when Kyo lets them back into their shared apartment he falls onto his bed midway through wriggling out of his damp jeans, feeling defeated. Kyo closes the curtains firmly.

'Still drunk,' he asks wryly, 'Or hungover yet?'

'Still the good one.' He kicks his legs limply and Kyo sighs, grabbing his jeans by the ankle and starting to pull.

'You know this wouldn't be an issue if you didn't wear such tight jeans.'

Toshiya holds one skinny arm up in the air and makes a flapping mouth out of his fingers and thumb. Kyo gives a hard yank and the jeans are finally off, and Toshiya starts to attempt to get his T-shirt up over his head but Kyo's hands are already there, tugging at it gently by the hem and working it patiently over his shoulders. Finally it's off, and Toshiya sighs. His underwear has gotten wet through his jeans from sitting in the puddles, and he starts to pull at the waistband ineffectually.

'Toshiya,' Kyo says in a tight sort of voice, and Toshiya rolls limply onto his back.

'They're wet.'

Kyo sighs harshly and Toshiya continues to struggle; the fabric is clinging damply to his skin and being back in the close environment of their room, away from the fresh air, is making him feel even drunker and more useless. His hands won't work the way he wants them to, and he shivers.

'It's cold.'

He hears another long, tetchy sigh, but the hands that cover his own are surprisingly gentle.

'Get your hands out of the way,' Kyo says in an uptight voice. 'I'm not looking, all right?'

'All right,' Toshiya agrees, and raises his hips as much as he can off the bed so Kyo can pull his underwear off him. There's a slightly awkward silence as Kyo gets the clothing down past his knees, and Toshiya thinks he hears him exhale in a relieved kind of way when they're finally all the way off. Messily, he pulls the covers over his naked body.

'Thanks, Kyo,' he says sleepily. 'Night.'

There's a pause. Then: 'Night,' Kyo says back, in a weird tone of voice. Yellow light is coming in through Toshiya's closed eyelids, but there's a snapping sound and it all goes dim again. He can hear the sound of fabric rustling as Kyo takes off his own clothes and drops them in a pile on the floor. There's a period of quiet where he loses track of where the other man is, and then the blanket over his shoulders is being moved and carefully arranged, covering more of him. He smiles faintly.

'Thanks.'

'Whatever.'

 

There's another long silence, but Toshiya can sense Kyo's body still by his bed. He cracks his eyes open and when they adjust to the darkness, he sees Kyo is kneeling on the floor next to him and studying his face very intently.

'What are you doing?' he asks, slurring only a little, and Kyo seems to think about his answer.

'Figuring something out,' he says shortly.

'Right. What?'

Silently, Kyo comes around on the other side of the bed and, taking a deep breath, climbs in behind him. His small form moulds itself to the shape of Toshiya's back, and Toshiya feels it as his hot breath hits his neck; his hands slide around Toshiya's waist, turning him gently, and in the dim morning light edging around the curtains Kyo is suddenly kissing him, one hand fisting tightly in Toshiya's hair and the other clutching at his waist.

For a second, sleepy and confused, Toshiya lets his eyes fall closed; feels Kyo's tongue push against his lower lip and sighs, because he's so lonely.

But Kyo's lips are the wrong shape. There's a piercing that's utterly unfamiliar, pressing cold against Toshiya's skin; his mouth has the wrong taste – not _bad_ , just not right.

'Kyo—' Toshiya pushes him away, startled; he wipes his lips with the back of his hand hesitantly and sees it straight away: the look of utter guilt on his friend's face. Kyo's lips look red and blurred from the kiss and his breathing is faster than normal but he looks so ashamed that he's almost unrecognisable: it's not an expression Toshiya's ever seen on his face before.

It's only visible for a minute and then Kyo is turning his back, climbing out of the bed angrily; he leaves Toshiya lying there shell-shocked as he stalks back across the room and gets under his own covers, his face pointedly to the wall so all Toshiya can see, when he turns, is the back of his head.

'Kyo,' he repeats softly, but wonders what he can possibly say. 'You're straight,' he says finally, knowing it's the wrong thing, and he sees his friend's shoulders go possibly more stiff than they already are.

'I don't want to talk about it,' he says stiffly, 'Forget it.'

He could be drunk, but he doesn't drink. Clumsily Toshiya gets himself out of bed and goes to his friend's side; he lays a gentle hand on his shoulder, feels how tense the muscles are under his skin.

'Kyo,' he says again.

'I mean it,' is the icy response, 'I don't want to talk about it. Fuck off.'

'But Kyo—'

'Fuck _off_ , I said! Are you really this stupid? Get your hands off me.' He pauses only slightly and then: 'You're trash, Hara, you know that? That's why he treats you like he does. Because you're trash and he knows it.'

Toshiya lays his cheek carefully on the edge of Kyo's mattress.

'Since when do you call me Hara?' he asks gently.

He doesn't get an answer, and in time all the alcohol he's drunk catches up with him; he falls asleep like that, legs sprawled out on the floor in an ungainly way and his upper body curled against the side of Kyo's bed.

 

He's still like that hours later, by which time Kyo has lain awake long enough; he has dressed and gone, careful not to disturb the sleeping form collapsed against his mattress. Toshiya doesn't stir as the duvet from his own bed is wrapped around him and tucked in carefully around his shoulders; he doesn't even wake when the door closes behind Kyo with a snap, and because he's so deeply asleep, he doesn't see the astonishing thing that happens to the patch of blank wall behind him: one moment it's just as it was, and the next it's sort of swinging wide to reveal a great blackness beyond; darkness, darkness, but at the very end of it a hint of something bright, a shining future too small and distant to make out, improbably proportioned, like something viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. It's only for a moment, but then the wall is back to normal, and he's no longer alone.

Toshiya is dreaming when a small hand sweeps the hair back from his face and tucks it behind his ear, strokes his cheek softly.

'Toshiya.'

Just a soft voice. His eyes struggle open blearily, and he smiles in relief against the sheets.

'You came,' he says, his voice thick and hoarse from sleep.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _My Heart's Not In It_ is a very sweet song by Yo La Tengo. An important thing about this song for me is how low-key and calm it is. I think it fits a lot better for the story in the song, and for me, that helps it to fit with this chapter too.


	10. Desire Lines

Kaoru dreams of his parents, the way they were when he was younger. He dreams of playing in a patch of sunlight on the kitchen floor, his mother's feet in their house slippers moving around him and his race cars; he dreams of the reflection of his parents' legs in the shiny oven door. It's more memory than dream; a memory he didn't know he had. If he could, he'd crawl inside it.

Kaoru dreams of the forest, and the sunlight through the leaves, and the way the tree trunks throw such huge shadows on the ground; shadows that all crash into each other so you don't have a single hope of untangling them. He dreams of himself tripping over a tree root as a kid, on his hands and knees on the forest floor, staring down at the ground as it turns featureless and white.

And the trees vanish, and the sky vanishes, and everything is white and blank. When he stands up again he's an adult, and he walks. He knows where he's going. In the endless, featureless whiteness, the door faces him slyly.

His feet move forward without him telling them to; he stretches out a hand and feels how the doorknob is cool under his skin, smooth and metallic. Its surface is covered in years' worth of his own fingerprints, the adult ones laid over the child ones, each as distinct as the last, like objects viewed through a microscope. He turns it, and the door swings open.

 

Toshiya sits up on his mattress, the sheets crumpling around his belly with a rustling noise. He rubs his eyes; searches for the shadow he just saw in the darkness.

He's not scared. He knows he should be, but he isn't, and he knows instinctively that he's not afraid because there is nothing to be afraid of; there's no risk, no threat.

It's a sweltering summer night in the mountains, and the air is still and damp and heavy. Every so often, very distantly, there's a low rumble of thunder. The shadow stirs, a glimmer of a man in front of his closet, which was closed when Toshiya went to sleep but now has one door swung wide open.

'Kaoru,' he says.

'Toshiya.'

Toshiya licks his lips, reaches out to turn on the little light that he keeps on the floor next to his futon. He flicks the switch and Kaoru's face flares into reality. He's looking around himself, confused; like Toshiya, he looks like he's just woken up, wearing only a T-shirt and underwear. Toshiya's never seen him so undressed before. He gets a sort of feeling, a weird feeling inside him, like he's dissolving, and just like that, he feels his blood start to rush in his veins.

'It's August,' he says, '1994.'

Kaoru gives him an embarrassed sort of smile.

'I'm so sorry,' he says, his voice pitched low, 'Did I wake you?'

'Did you travel here in your sleep?' Toshiya asks curiously, ignoring Kaoru's question. He pushes the sheet off him – it's too hot for it anyway – and gets to his feet. Kaoru looks even shyer, now; his eyes scan Toshiya from his feet to his face and then quickly look away, as if what he sees scares him.

'I did,' he says, his voice sounding just a shade deeper than normal, 'It can happen that way sometimes. It was more common when I was young.' He smiles a little bitterly, 'It drove my parents crazy. How do you explain putting your child to bed and not being able to find him in the morning?'

Carefully, Toshiya steps closer. There's a slight shake in Kaoru's voice, and the other man is keeping his eyes very firmly fixed on the floor. In this kind of light, Toshiya can't quite tell how old he is.

 

'I'm sorry,' Kaoru says uncomfortably, 'I shouldn't be in your bedroom.'

'You've been in my bedroom loads of times.'

'I know, but—' Kaoru hesitates, helpless, 'This is different.'

'Why is it different?' Toshiya asks. He's moving closer, slowly, all the time, as if Kaoru is a wild animal that will get spooked at sudden movements; from far away, over some of the more distant peaks, there's a flash and lingering afterglow of heat lightning.

'Toshiya...'

Toshiya wraps his hot arms around Kaoru's shoulders cautiously. The older man has no choice but to look at him, now, and so he matches Toshiya's stare miserably. Gently, Toshiya places Kaoru's hands on his waist, and when the older man tries to pull them away he holds them there.

He kisses him, and Kaoru wonders when they started kissing like this. Ever since that first time, that mistake, Toshiya has been pushing for it; hugging him goodbye, holding onto him a little too long, looking at him too closely. Toshiya's mouth is soft. He's young; he can't tell how young. Kaoru tries to pull back and the teenager just holds onto him harder, and Kaoru feels a wet tongue pushing softly against his lower lip.

' _Toshiya_ —'

The kid's looking at him with a steady, adult sort of gaze, so focussed it's almost frightening. Kaoru swallows, and Toshiya's eyes watch him as his fingers gently stroke the side of Kaoru's face.

'I'm seventeen,' he says, reading the question he sees in the older man's eyes, 'I'm old enough. And I want this.' He pauses, smile, bites his lip, 'Sit down with me.'

They sit on Toshiya's mattress, their backs against the wall, and Kaoru rubs his hands over his face tiredly. He wishes he was more awake; he feels confused. Toshiyas at different ages seem to flicker inside his head, layering themselves over the top of this current Toshiya so he can't tell which is correct; is he seventeen, twenty, fifteen, six, twenty-three, twelve, nineteen?

There's a light but dangerous feeling in the pit of his stomach; desire, guilt. He closes his eyes as Toshiya crawls into his lap.

'Toshiya—'

'Kaoru, look at me.'

Warily, he does so. He thinks, not for the first time, that it's impossible how beautiful it is; that it's unfair. His eyes are dark and they're almost glowing, alive with something like electricity, something growing and edging closer like the distant thunder; his hair is a soft spill around his shoulders, crackling like lightning; his skin is at blood heat. Kaoru looks at his arms and his legs, long and lean and graceful; limbs he's grown into at last, gained some control over.

'Kaoru,' Toshiya says seriously, 'I'm a man now.'

Kaoru collects himself, tries to force his mouth into a wry smile. 'Actually,' he says with difficulty, 'No, you're not.'

Toshiya puts his lips close by Kaoru's ear, traces his fingers experimentally between the older man's thighs and says, 'I want you to fuck me.'

 

He feels a twitch beneath his fingertips and presses a tiny kiss to the skin below Kaoru's ear. He can tell the older man is trying to stop it; his breathing shudders and his heart is thrashing and his hands are steadfastly on the floor, refusing to touch the body positioned so seductively over the top of his own; but he can't hide it: he's getting hard. Toshiya moves his hand slightly, rubbing, mesmerised by the feeling of another man's dick getting stiff against his palm.

'Toshiya,' Kaoru says in a desperate sort of voice, 'I – I can't do this. Please don't...don't tempt me.'

His hand wraps around Toshiya's wrist but stills there, neither pulling his hand closer nor pushing it away.

'Why can't you do it?' Toshiya asks, his voice slightly huskier than normal.

'Because you're so young. You're too young. I can't—'

'Kaoru,' Toshiya says simply, 'I'm ready.'

He gets to his feet, watching the way Kaoru's eyes seem to darken as he stops touching him, and steps back into the centre of the room. Nervously, watching the older man's face, he pulls his T-shirt off over his head. His heart feels like it's going too fast in his chest, and his hands feel clumsy and full of blood as he hooks them into the waist of his boxer briefs, dragging the fabric down slowly. He's already hard when he steps out of his underwear; for some reason he can't fully explain, he's been hard ever since he first realised it was Kaoru who was in his room.

He licks his lips anxiously, watching the different expressions play over Kaoru's face. The older man looks completely spellbound, almost hypnotised, and when Toshiya kneels down in front of him his eyes are almost afraid. He shakes his head wordlessly, and Toshiya pulls him up so they're kneeling together, sliding his hands carefully under Kaoru's T-shirt.

'I've wanted this since I was thirteen,' he says seriously, and Kaoru sort of flinches like Toshiya's hit him.

'It's not right,' he says, his voice gruff but weak; his hands settle themselves uncertainly on Toshiya's hips. 'We can't – _I_ can't—'

'You can.' Toshiya bites his lip, looks at Kaoru with a strange smile, 'You've already done this with me, in the future, haven't you?'

'Yeah,' Kaoru says helplessly, feeling it's sort of pointless to lie now. Toshiya gives a shy sort of smile.

'Was I...' he pushes an awkward hand through his hair, 'Was I any good?'

'Toshiya,' Kaoru says, his voice full of impossible love. He smooths Toshiya's hair back from his face; feels the way the gesture turns into a caress. As gently as he can he says, 'Of course you were.'

Toshiya smiles. 'It's time,' he says, and Kaoru lays him down.

 

His first thought is that this, being with another man, feels nothing like he thought it would.

It's better.

Shouldn't he have known or at least guessed how thorough Kaoru would be; how gentle and how considered? He's older, but he's almost shy; he lets Toshiya undress him and shivers despite the thick heat. They lie side by side on the futon and Toshiya feels like he's going to lose his mind just at the feeling of their naked bodies together; clutches Kaoru closer and husks a weird little laugh into his bare shoulder.

'If I cum too soon...' he mutters embarrassedly, and a shaking hand strokes his hair.

'We can stop anytime you like.'

In response, Toshiya wraps his hand around Kaoru's dick, pulling a soft noise from the other man's throat. He gives it an experimental stroke, feeling the heat of it and the texture of the skin, getting to know it in the way he knows his own; he brushes his thumb along the underside of the head and Kaoru makes an altogether different noise, quieter but deeper, and it goes straight to Toshiya's own cock. Maybe Kaoru feels it twitch against his hip, because he gently tilts Toshiya's head back and kisses him. It's a light kiss, careful. Not enough. With a breathy groan Toshiya pulls him closer, tangling his long fingers in Kaoru's long hair; he licks at the older man's lower lip and feels Kaoru's tongue against his, hesitant.

'Toshiya—'

'Kiss me,' he whispers, his words redundant because they're being breathed directly against Kaoru's lips, 'Kiss me.'

For Kaoru, it's like drowning, more sensation than thought. The part of his mind that's shouting at him to stop gets quieter and quieter, like he's drifting out of range of its static shriek; he runs a hand up Toshiya's thigh and shifts to be more on top of him, bracing himself on his arms. His dick nudges Toshiya's belly and he angles his hips lower, letting their two cocks touch; Toshiya gives a graceless moan and arches up. His dick is already leaking precum; it smears an indecent trail over Kaoru's skin.

'I'm not going to last long,' the teenager mumbles embarrassedly, and Kaoru smiles against his forehead.

'Toshiya, it's okay.'

'No, I mean...' Toshiya pushes his hair out of his eyes, grabbing Kaoru's cock with his free hand and guiding it to where he wants it, 'I don't want to cum until you're inside me.'

It's shameful, Kaoru thinks, how much that makes him shiver. It's wrong. Evil.

'We need something,' he says, his words sounding calmer than he feels, 'Lube or something.'

'Lube?'

Kaoru closes his eyes briefly, wonders if he's going straight to hell after this. 'Lubricant,' he says.

'Oh, right.' Toshiya sounds strangely breathless. 'I've got lotion. Will that work? I...' underneath Kaoru's naked body he blushes fiercely, 'I've tried it before. With my fingers.'

He's not alone in being embarrassed: Kaoru flushes too, trying hard not to picture that and failing miserably. He clutches a handful of Toshiya's pillow, trying to calm himself down, 'That should work,' he says shortly, a slight shake in his voice that Toshiya's never heard before. There's a brief moment of fumbling, Toshiya trying to kiss Kaoru at the same time as he's reaching around the area by his bed, but eventually he has their mouths almost smashed together and a bottle pushed into Kaoru's hand. Fingers slipping excitedly, Toshiya opens the cap, and Kaoru pours some on his fingers and pauses.

It's a long pause and Toshiya hangs at the end of it, his eyes looking up into Kaoru's desperately. The older man's face is close to his and so, so serious, and Toshiya understands why sex is generally left to grown-ups: the way Kaoru's looking at him is so many things at once; it's care and it's affection and it's worry and hesitation, it's a mild panic, a fierce desire; on top of all those things, pure and unwavering, it's love.

'Are you sure?' Kaoru asks at last, his voice husky. Toshiya could come up with a smart-ass reply, but instead he just bites his lower lip as he nods. His fingers trembling slightly, he wraps his hand around Kaoru's and pulls it gently between his legs. There's a wet sort of feeling and Kaoru's finger just slips over his hole, making him shiver hard; a loud groan almost escapes his lips but he bites it back. He squeezes his eyes tightly closed as Kaoru's touch shifts, rubbing gently to try to encourage Toshiya's muscles to relax.

'Please,' Toshiya finds himself saying, feeling the sweat beading on his forehead, ' _Please_ , Kaoru.' He wriggles, trying to push himself down, and gives a panting little sigh as he feels Kaoru's finger slip inside him.

 

There's a beat of quiet and stillness, the only sound their ragged breathing, fogging up the one small window in Toshiya's bedroom. Toshiya's fingernails dig hard into Kaoru's shoulder as he tries to yank himself back under control, desperate not to cum now that he's so close to getting what he wants. Slowly Kaoru pushes deeper, slipping another finger in beside the first and then pressing their foreheads together, giving Toshiya time to adjust; the teenager has his eyes closed and Kaoru kisses his cheeks, his jaw, his neck, lines of soft little kisses to bring him back to himself. He feels Toshiya shift and knows what he's trying to do; slightly embarrassed, he buries his face in the teenager's neck.

'My fingers are too small,' he whispers, 'I can't – I won't be able to reach.'

Toshiya's hand strokes at his dick, working him up, 'This isn't too small,' he says, and his voice is different; it's lower-sounding, Kaoru thinks, more masculine. When he looks into his eyes, his pupils are so dilated they look almost completely black; his cheeks are red and he's panting on each breath, his lips trembling as Kaoru's fingers move and stretch inside of him.

He's beautiful. He's always been beautiful, of course, but he's never heard Kaoru murmur it to him over and over; he's never felt it whispered in his ear as a hot dick, slippery with cool lotion, presses itself up against him.

'I love you,' Toshiya blurts, and Kaoru stills.

'I love you too,' he says, his voice strange. His eyes look a little wet, Toshiya notices, but there's no time to think about it; Kaoru's thumb is stroking his cheek gently, his cock urgent-feeling against Toshiya's body.

'It's not too late to say no,' he whispers, and Toshiya's long arms come up around his body, gripping him by the ass, pulling him inside. It's awkward, at first – Toshiya's never had anything thicker than his own two fingers inside him, and for an uncomfortable moment it seems that Kaoru won't fit – but then Kaoru lets out a long breath that he hadn't realised he'd been holding onto, feeling the tip of his dick slide into Toshiya's warm body. He stills, lets Toshiya adjust – he's almost mewling, his hands clutching at Kaoru's ass excitedly – before working himself all the way in.

For Toshiya, it's an impossible feeling. He's so tight that he can feel Kaoru's pulse beating inside him, and it could make him cry if he wasn't so turned on; how intimate it feels, how close. Is this why Kaoru needed so much convincing; was this what he's been so scared of, the power of it? Because it is powerful; Toshiya can feel how powerful it is, and that's why he's gripping onto Kaoru so tightly; he almost feels like if he doesn't, they'll fly apart. The world has narrowed down to just the two of them at a fine point, the rest of it – the earth, the sky, the room around them – fading into a background hum.

 _This is the way it's supposed to be_.

He's not sure if he's speaking aloud or not. He pushes his hips up as Kaoru begins to slowly move inside him, their foreheads pressed tightly together and their eyes locked, _this is the way it's supposed to be, forever._

The older man pulls out almost all the way before sliding back into him, and he shivers, fingernails digging into his skin; his head falls back and he feels gentle lips kissing at his throat.

'Kaoru...'

Kaoru moves a certain way, experimentally, and knows he's hit the right spot; Toshiya almost arches off the mattress, his lips opening in a soft cry; his hands are suddenly all over Kaoru's body, grasping needily and urging at him to do it again.

'Please,' he mutters incoherently, his dick twitching hard against Kaoru's stomach, 'Please Kaoru, please, _please_ —'

It's harder this time, surer, and Toshiya makes a sobbing sort of noise. He clutches Kaoru's hair and his shoulder and rocks their bodies together, his legs trembling; he's close and he's dimly aware that it's too soon, _far_ too soon for things to be over, but his self control is gone; he's responding so desperately to Kaoru's movements that he's all but fucking himself on the other man's cock, and then two things happen at once.

The first is Kaoru whispering, 'It's okay,' into his ear.

The second is Kaoru's hand slipping around Toshiya's dick, squeezing and stroking just slightly—

Toshiya cries out as he goes over the edge, muffling the noise as best he can against Kaoru's skin; his hips buck upwards fiercely, every muscle tensing, his thighs shaking. His cum spatters thickly against Kaoru's chest and he feels it dimly as the older man moves with him, letting him ride the orgasm out until he's gasping, his eyes closed.

His whole body feels limp, and there's a soft kiss pressed to his cheek.

'Are you okay?'

'Yeah,' Toshiya says dazedly. He drags Kaoru down for a kiss and has to break it when he runs out of breath; panting harshly, he lets his head fall backwards again. 'Fuck,' he whispers, maybe to himself. 'Kaoru, you didn't cum, I—'

A pair of soft lips shush him, brushing against his mouth just lightly. 'It doesn't matter,' Kaoru says, 'Just rest.'

Carefully, a hand braced on Toshiya's hip, he pulls out; there's an awful emptiness, then. Toshiya squirms as Kaoru picks up his own discarded T-shirt and gently lifts his leg to clean him off, removing all the traces of lotion from his skin; he swipes it over his own chest, getting off most of the cum, although a little still glistens around his collarbones.

He looks at Toshiya with such tenderness in his eyes that he feels he really could cry now, but he's scared to, because he doesn't want Kaoru to think that he's hurt him.

 

'Come here,' he says, his voice a little thick, and Kaoru lies himself down beside him. His small hands turn Toshiya onto his side and then he's curling up behind him, their bodies flush together, Kaoru's chest tight against Toshiya's back and his arms loose around his waist. He presses a kiss to the back of his neck, lingering over the skin there, closing his eyes as his own regret crashes into him like a wave.

'Are you sure you're okay?' he asks, a little tremble in his voice, and Toshiya tangles their hands together.

'I'm great,' he says honestly. 'I'm just – that was intense, you know?'

'I know,' Kaoru says quietly. He feels Toshiya wriggle back further into his embrace and closes his eyes, squeezing his guilt close to his chest along with Toshiya's warm, pliant body.

 _I can never forgive myself for this_ , he realises.

 _Never until the day I die_.

'Will you stay holding onto me?' Toshiya asks in a small voice, and Kaoru places a kiss just behind his ear.

He feels as though his heart is breaking but, 'Of course I will,' he says, his tone low and calm and reliable.

'Thanks. Kaoru?'

'Yeah?'

Toshiya hesitates. 'Please don't fall asleep,' he whispers.

A tear spills out of Kaoru's eye and runs down his face, blotting itself into Toshiya's futon mattress.

'I won't.'

 

And he doesn't. They say their goodbyes in the pale blue morning when Toshiya wakes up, and if both their eyes are red it could just as easily be from lack of sleep. They kiss what feels like a thousand times; they can't stop. The sun rises slowly, and Toshiya has to start hunting around for his school uniform.

'I love you,' he says over and over again, haphazardly. He dresses; swings his bag over his shoulder.

'I love you too, Toshiya.'

There's that feeling again: that feeling like something inside of Kaoru is breaking into pieces. 'Don't ever doubt it,' he says. He wrings his hands painfully. 'If ever – later, if you ever feel like I shouldn't have done this. I just...I never, ever meant to hurt you, Toshiya. I promise.'

The teenager smiles at him, kisses him one last time, and then another last time, and another.

'When you look back on this,' he says quietly, 'Years later, you'll know how right it was. I know you felt it. This was the way it was supposed to be.'

One last kiss, and another last kiss. Toshiya hesitates by his bedroom door.

'Come back soon,' he says, and Kaoru makes a promise that he knows he has no way of ensuring he keeps.

He stays awhile in Toshiya's room, just absorbing the feeling of the teenager's space, until at last he climbs awkwardly to his feet and grips the brass doorknob on Toshiya's closet.

He opens the door and the scene changes.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are a few songs out there called _Desire Lines_...the one I'm thinking of is by the band Deerhunter.   
>  I thought it was an interesting song in this context because, although it's possible to read it as being quite a romantic song with some sexual hints in there, the lyricist and lead singer in Deerhunter identifies as asexual. I found that quite an interesting contrast, and in the context of this fic, it felt nice to have something that was sexual but also not, like there's some kind of discord because they don't, after all, exist in the same time.


	11. Thought I Was A Spaceman

Whilst his mother talks to the doctor, Kaoru sits on a chair in a separate room and swings his legs. They aren't quite long enough to touch the floor yet, and sometimes he wonders if they ever will be. When do you stop growing? He can't remember starting, so he must have started when he was a baby, maybe. But babies don't seem to grow _up_ , they just get bigger and start to look more like people until suddenly they're children too.

He squeezes his eyes shut and tries extra hard, just in case it works this time and he finds himself tall as a grown-up.

The room he's sitting in is filled with toys, lots of different types: dolls and plush animals and Lego, and little army men, and plastic robots and little cars and trucks and boats – that doesn't make sense because boats go on water, like in the bath – and a train set complete with tunnels and hills that the train has to go through and around. There are musical instruments, too; but kid ones, not real ones. The kid ones _never_ sound right, but Kaoru wants to give the toy guitar a go anyway, just to see if this one might be different.

He hasn't been told if he's allowed to touch the toys or not, though, and so he sits and looks down at his knees a bit miserably. If he was at home he might have given it a go, but his mother has said to him in a very firm voice that it's important to do everything this special doctor says, and answer all of the doctor's questions if he can.

Kaoru misses the normal doctor. She's a tall lady with wrinkles like nice brackets around her mouth, like she's smiled them there, and when she uses her wooden stick to hold down Kaoru's tongue and makes him say _aaah_ she plays a game like he's being so loud he's blowing her backwards; he likes that, it's sort of funny, like a cartoon. Once when Kaoru brought in his gundam robot toy, she made it sit down next to Kaoru on the weird high bed and listened to its chest with her stethoscope just like she listened to his. She didn't ask it to cough, though; she said it was okay.

She didn't get that it was a robot, and there was actually a man being the pilot inside. She didn't check _his_ chest.

 

Kaoru's mother and the doctor – who is a man with fuzzy strips of hair growing in front of his ears, one of the weirdest things Kaoru has ever seen – come in through the door that leads from the doctor's office into the room full of toys, and Kaoru's mother is smiling in a strange, brave sort of way. She sits down on the chair next to him and crosses her legs, and she smooths his hair flat even though it doesn't need smoothing.

'Sweetheart,' she says in a funny voice, 'This is Doctor Watanabe.'

Kaoru looks up through his fringe. 'Ichiro's dad?'

'Hm? Oh...' Kaoru's mother does the sort of laugh she does when something's not really funny, just annoying: 'Oh, no. No, nothing to do with Ichiro. He has a friend at school,' she says in a different voice, and Kaoru realises she's talking to the doctor now, 'Called Ichiro Watanabe. That's why—'

'Do you have a lot of friends at school, Kaoru?' the doctor asks, interrupting her but not like in a rude way; more like he understands that she's not very interested in what she's talking about. Kaoru looks up at him and chews on the inside of his cheek. He wants to grab the funny hairs in front of his ears and give them a tug to see what happens.

'Some,' he says. 'Me and Ichiro aren't friends. We're just in the same class.'

'Oh, Kaoru,' his mother scolds, 'Ichiro is your friend!'

'I don't play with Ichiro at break,' Kaoru says stubbornly, 'He always wants to play guns and I hate playing guns.'

'And what do you like to play, Kaoru?'

'Police,' he answers without a pause.

'And what does that entail?'

'En...tail?' Kaoru tries out the word slowly.

'What do you have to do to play police, I mean?'

'You have to drive around in a car with a siren, and you have to put the baddies in jail.'

'So who are the baddies?'

Kaoru shrugs, looking back down at his knees. He bites the inside of his cheek harder and he accidentally tastes some blood, which is disgusting; it tastes like coins smell.

'Do you like playing make believe, Kaoru?'

Another shrug. His mother touches his hand gently, turns it over and presses her thumb into his palm the way she does when she's being really serious, 'Remember what we said about answering all the doctor's questions?' she whispers, her hair tickling Kaoru's cheek and her perfume tickling the inside of his nose. He squirms.

'Yeah,' he answers in a small voice.

'What do you like to pretend, apart from being a policeman?'

'I...' Kaoru falters, 'Sometimes when we're in the car, I pretend that I'm knocking down all the signs.'

'All the signs?'

'Road signs, he means.'

'When we pass them.'

'Ah,' the doctor says. He pulls a little notepad and a ballpoint pen out of his pocket, and he doesn't write anything down, but he clicks the pen to have it ready. 'Anything else?'

'Sometimes I like playing astronaut.'

'Ah,' he says again but in a bit of a brighter way, 'So when you play astronaut, what do you do?'

'You have to walk like you keep flying up in the air, and you have to watch out for aliens, and you have to be in your rocket and say _Houston we have a problem_ when you...when there's a problem,' he finishes lamely. He gives another squirm.

'Very good,' the doctor says. He writes a bit of something down then, very quickly. 'So. Pretending is a lot like telling lies, isn't it? You have to use your imagination a lot.'

Kaoru gets a sinking sort of feeling in his chest; he knows where this is going.

 

'I don't tell lies,' he says quietly.

'Everyone tells lies sometimes. I had to tell a lie to my wife this morning; I had to lie and say that I liked her skirt, so I didn't hurt her feelings. Some lies can be good, you see, like telling a little lie just so you don't make somebody upset, or playing a pretend game. Right?'

Kaoru gives the tiniest possible nod, still staring down at his lap.

'Some lies aren't good, though,' the doctor continues. 'Do you know the difference?'

Another tiny nod. Kaoru wishes he could play with the toys. He could build a big wall out of the blocks and hide behind it.

'Your mother tells me that you like to hide,' the doctor says, and Kaoru looks up at him in panic because it's like he can read his mind. The doctor gives him a smile. 'She says that you like to hide for hours and hours, and when you come out, you pretend that you've been somewhere else. Is that right?'

Kaoru shakes his head no.

'So what really happens, then?'

Kaoru casts a doubtful look up at his mother, who is very carefully not looking back at him. He gives a painful shrug.

'The handle on the door,' he says. He clears his throat the way he's heard adults do when they want to say something important. 'Sometimes I turn it and the door doesn't go to the same place.'

The doctor's eyes slide towards Kaoru's mother's eyes, and Kaoru feels a burning frustration that makes him want to cry, 'Sometimes it goes somewhere else. The door is to another place. Once my bedroom door went into a field. Once—'

'All right, Kaoru,' his mother says quietly, but he gives his head a vigorous shake.

'It's not just places,' he says insistently, 'It's—' he casts a helpless look up at her, wanting desperately for her to look at him so he knows that she still loves him and might believe him one day, 'It's _time_.'

'Time?' the doctor says. Kaoru hesitates.

'It's going backwards in time,' he says in a small voice.

'Oh? How far back?'

Kaoru shrugs hopelessly. 'I don't know. The machines are different. The cars look funny.'

'Funny. Hm.' Doctor Watanabe makes a little note about that and then gives Kaoru's mother a polite smile. 'Does he watch a lot of science fiction programmes?' he asks, 'Or maybe play science fiction games, or read any comics or simple books of that nature?'

'He's obsessed,' Kaoru's mother says in a relieved kind of way, 'He's transfixed by that old battle robots programme – he gets it from my husband; they watch it together every weekend – Gundom or something—'

'Gun _dam_ ,' Kaoru corrects angrily, 'And they don't go back in time!'

'Would it be better if they did travel in time?' Doctor Watanabe asks gently, and Kaoru pauses. The doctor is looking at him now. 'Sometimes,' the doctor says, 'Going back in time would be a really good way to escape from bad things that are happening in the present, right?'

This feels sort of like a trick, and Kaoru looks at the doctor worriedly. 'Yeah,' he says carefully.

'Do bad things sometimes happen to you? In the present, I mean?'

 

Kaoru doesn't know how to answer that. Bad things happen to everybody, don't they? Sometimes he falls over and makes his knees all bloody: that's a bad thing. Sometimes his parents yell at him: that's a bad thing too. Sometimes his teacher at school tells him off for daydreaming, sometimes dogs aren't friendly so he's not allowed to say hello, sometimes he has to go to the dentist or get a haircut. Once he got a deep splinter in his finger and his mother had to dig it out with some tweezers she'd held over the burner on the stove; that was a really bad thing.

He wonders about the travelling; whether that's a bad thing or not. It's not so bad, he decides, but it makes everybody so _angry_ when he gets back.

'Kaoru?' the doctor is prompting, and Kaoru looks up at him. He's been chewing the inside of his cheek again while he thinks; now his mouth is full of that horrible blood taste. He swallows it down but it makes him feel a bit sick.

'Some things are bad,' he says warily.

'And when you travel back in time, you get to go away from those things for a while, right?'

'I guess,' Kaoru says, still looking up at the doctor cautiously. He swallows a bit more blood. He can smell Doctor Watanabe's breath and it smells bad, like coffee but gone all stale. His stomach gives a weird little wriggle, like all his breakfast is flipping over inside it. The room feels a bit too hot.

'Can you tell me about some of the bad things?' Doctor Watanabe asks, his breath hitting Kaoru's face, and Kaoru takes a deep breath and throws up all over the floor.

 

Driving home, his mother seems almost angry, even though Kaoru's sick and she's told him that it's not his fault. She's sort of quiet, and whenever she has to change gear she does it roughly. Sometimes when they're on the street in front of their house she lets Kaoru sit on her lap and gives him a turn using the steering wheel while she does the pedals, but that doesn't happen today. Instead, she parks the car and turns off the engine but she doesn't take off the child locks, so Kaoru can't get his door open. He shifts uncomfortably in his booster seat, wishing he didn't have to use it. They're for _babies_ , but his mother says he's still too small.

'Kaoru,' she says suddenly, talking to him even though she's looking out of the windscreen like she's still driving, ' _Does_ anything bad ever happen? Really bad things, I mean? Things you don't tell us about?'

Kaoru hesitates, because there's a weird kind of break in her voice that makes him feel scared. 'No,' he says unconvincingly, and he watches her reflection in the rear view mirror as she rubs her forehead hard with both her hands. Then she does a funny thing: she puts her hands back on the steering wheel and grips it hard even though the car isn't even on. Her knuckles go a yellowy-white colour and her wedding ring makes a clicking noise against the wheel.

'Are there any adults that ever do things you're not comfortable with?' she asks abruptly. 'Do they ever hurt you, or touch you in your private places?'

 _Private_ places? Who would want to touch _there_? Kaoru blushes, cupping his hands defensively around his crotch.

'It's okay to tell me,' his mother says, 'I promise. Even if they've said that something bad will happen if you tell, or that we'll be angry; I promise, we won't. Nothing bad will happen, sweetheart.'

'Nobody sees my private places,' Kaoru says firmly, then remembers that's not true. 'Only dad,' he amends.

'Your _father_?'

Her voice is horrible then; it's quiet but it's almost a screech, and her hands tighten so much it looks for a minute like the steering wheel is going to go snap. Kaoru panics; feels sick again; he looks longingly out of the window and towards the house. He wants to get out of the car. He wants to go and be alone for a long time. He wants to sit in the closet in his bedroom where they keep all his winter clothes in the summer and his summer clothes in the winter, where it's dark and everything smells nice and clean, like laundry.

'Kaoru,' his mother is saying, her voice sounding sort of like a wire stretched tight, 'Kaoru, listen to me. This is very important. When does your father see your private places?'

Kaoru blinks at her miserably. The urge to puke again is swelling up inside him like a balloon. 'In the bath,' he says, almost annoyed because she should know that; she knows that he takes his baths with dad and she takes her baths alone.

'Mum,' he says timidly. He's frightened he's going to be sick again, all over the car, but how can that happen? He's already been sick and his stomach hasn't had any time to fill itself up again. 'Can we go in?'

Without answering, Kaoru's mother punches the button that lets the child locks off the doors. She makes a sniffing noise and wipes her face before getting out of the car.

 

Later that night, there's a big argument whilst Kaoru is in bed. He's been in bed all afternoon, because every time he thinks about the taste of blood or Doctor Watanabe's breath or his mum's weird, high voice, he feels sick again. Now it's late though, dark outside, and he bites off all his fingernails while they argue downstairs.

He wasn't allowed to have a bath with dad tonight. His mother said it was because he was ill and it's a bad time for dad to get sick, but how can you get germs in the bath? The bath is where you get clean. Everybody knows that. It's for washing all the germs _off_ ; that's why it's important. Instead, his mum bathed him, not getting in the tub with him but kneeling on the hard tile floor and washing his hair for him, even though Kaoru normally does that himself. He uses the shampoo to make his hair into horns.

He sort of thinks that Doctor Watanabe was right, and that the past would be a really good place to escape the bad things that happen in the present. His parents arguing: that's definitely a bad thing. It's sort of like smoke, filtering all through the house and making the air into poison. When there's a fire, Kaoru's dad explained to him once, it's not that the flames kill you by burning you all up; it's the smoke that goes into your lungs instead of air. That's scarier, Kaoru thinks. Like drowning but not being in the water.

The brass doorknob is sticking out of the wall, but he's been ignoring it for a while. It just keeps catching his eye, because it's shiny, and because even though he knows it's bad, he's curious as well. How did it get there? Nobody put it there. It's like it grew, like a weird shiny mushroom. He wants to know what will happen to the door if he turns it; if it'll open a hole in a rectangle shape like a regular door or if it'll be more of a round hole, the way it was when he crawled into the tree, or a funny fancy arch the way it was when the doorknob appeared in the wall surrounding their garden.

Forget it.

He turns onto his other side so he can't see the doorknob any more. He screws his eyes tightly shut.

 

Despite the tense voices from downstairs Kaoru must have fallen asleep, because he's dreaming.

It's a dream he thinks he can remember having, just vaguely. It's a dream that doesn't feel like a dream; it feels exactly like real life. There are no people in it, but he's there, and he's sort of there in the way that he is in real life; like he can hear the air going in and out of his lungs and his heart banging away in his chest. He's wearing his pyjamas which are patterned all over with spaceships; these are the ones where, whenever he's wearing them and his dad tucks him in, he doesn't say _sleep well_ or _sweet dream_ s, he says _three two one blast off_. His dad didn't tuck him in tonight; his mother did it.

Everything everywhere is white, and there's no lines between the floor and the walls and the ceiling, which is confusing. The only thing around is a door that's really far away, and it looks small but when he gets closer to it, it's big. The doorknob is all the way above his head; he has to reach up.

He turns it and the scene changes. A cold wind blows in and ruffles his hair and bangs his teeth together. His eyes start watering straight away, and the white of the floor has replaced itself with frost against his bare feet, and there's ice everywhere and the sky is bright grey and there are gravestones all around. It's sort of snowing, or trying to snow; flakes keep falling down all by themselves.

It's cold, and he shivers. There's nobody around, and all outside the wall of the graveyard there's fog so he can't see what's going on.

He's done it again, and his mother is going to be so angry. She might be doing that thing where she shouts at his dad instead of him, and that makes him feel so bad it's like a big hole has opened up in the middle of his chest.

 

'Hey, kid.'

He turns around pretty quickly when he hears the voice, scrubbing off his cheeks so nobody can see he's been crying like a little baby again. The person talking is a man, and he's got funny hair and funny clothes but he looks familiar, too. He looks so familiar that it kind of hurts a bit, and Kaoru stares up at him and feels a bit scared.

He looks like Kaoru's dad, but he's not Kaoru's dad. But he sort of looks like Kaoru's mum, as well.

Suddenly, he feels very tired and sits down on the frozen ground. He doesn't feel all sick like he did earlier; he just feels tired of everything and he wants to go home. He wants to be back in his bed where it's warm and everything looks the same and his parents look like who they are, and nobody else looks like them at all.

A heavy jacket drops itself around his shoulders, and then a pair of careful hands are pulling it close around him. The hands have dark tattoos on them; Kaoru stares with big eyes.

'It's okay,' the man mutters, 'Did you come here in your sleep?'

Kaoru looks up at him solemnly. 'It's a dream,' he says. The man hesitates.

'Maybe,' he says in a gentle sort of voice. 'You're five, right?'

'How'd you know?'

'Your pyjamas.' The man sort of touches the collar of them for a moment, and then his hand retreats. 'C'mon,' he says, 'I know where the door back is.'

'Back?'

'To your bedroom.'

Kaoru blinks up at him, startled, and the man sighs – his breath comes out as a big white cloud – before sitting down next to Kaoru on the cold ground, shivering a little bit as he does so. Because Kaoru's wearing his jacket his arms are bare, and Kaoru can see the way the tattoos go all the way up them. He wants to touch, and he does so, carefully. They just feel like normal skin, though.

'You like them?' the man asks, something in his voice a little bit like he's smiling, but not meanly. Kaoru nods, too interested in the patterns to say more. He tries to follow them with his finger but his hand is a bit too clumsy; it keeps going outside the lines, like it still does when he colours sometimes. He sits quietly like that for a while, trying to follow the patterns and also figure out what this weird man has said to him, all about going back and ending up in his bedroom and finding the door.

It's important, Kaoru realises at last, because this man believes him. He glances up at him, feeling strangely calm.

'You think I'm telling the truth?' he asks plainly.

'The truth?'

'About the doors, and where I go.'

'Oh. Yeah, I know you're telling the truth.' The man sort of nudges him slightly. 'I know nobody believes you right now, but they will, I promise.'

'Yeah?' Kaoru swallows hard, feeling that stupid lump rise up in his throat again, 'When?'

'In time,' the man says simply. He eyes Kaoru's bare feet on the ground and sighs again. 'You're going to catch your death, kid.' He gives a weird sort of laugh, more of a hmphing sound, like he's only laughing through his nose. 'Actually, I think you do get pretty sick after this, if I'm remembering right. Worst bronchitis of your life.'

'Bron...?'

'Like a bad cold, but in your chest.' The man taps his own chest lightly. Kaoru considers this.

'Do I die?'

'No, you don't die.'

'Are you a ghost?'

The man gives another weird smile. 'No, I'm not a ghost. Why would you think that?'

'You sort of look like my dad,' Kaoru says. He's aware this is a pretty nonsensical answer, but the man is nodding like that's all fine by him.

'But with your mum's nose, right?'

Kaoru blinks up at him. 'Right.'

The man nods like this is what he's been waiting to hear, and he gets to his feet. He reaches down and sort of pulls Kaoru up, tugging the jacket tight around him where it's slipping. 'C'mon,' he says easily, 'Time to go back.'

Kaoru falters. 'Will they be angry?'

'Your...mum and dad? No, no, they won't know this time. If you come with me now, you'll only have been gone a few minutes.'

Kaoru still hesitates. 'Okay,' he says at last. The man's got a sharp sort of face, but Kaoru watches it go all sort of soft when he says that.

'Good boy,' the man says quietly. 'I know it's not great right now. They both love you so much, they – they just don't really understand that they're hurting you.'

The man leads him to a gravestone that's not a long walk away, and Kaoru's only a little bit surprised to see the metal doorknob sticking right out of it. It's weird though, it sort of looks less shiny than it usually does. The man touches it lightly and then pulls his hand away and traces the name on the grave.

'Can you read that?' he asks quietly, and Kaoru shakes his head because it's all kanji that he doesn't know. He doesn't know much kanji yet. Sometimes it feels like the world is full of millions and millions of them and he'll never ever learn them all; they just won't all fit in his head. He reaches up to run his finger the name and the man moves his hand away, looking a bit surprised. When Kaoru's done, he gives him a solemn sort of nod and gestures to the doorknob.

'Okay, kid,' he says, his voice all weird and husky-sounding, 'Time to go. Only...' he clucks his tongue, 'I'd better take that jacket back. You won't be able to explain that to your parents.'

Kaoru sort of doesn't want to, because the jacket is pretty cool-looking, but he hands it over. The cold wind hits him again and the man places a gentle hand on his back, guiding him towards the door. Kaoru looks at him.

'Bye,' he says. The man smiles.

'See you around.'

Kaoru opens the door and his bed is cold like nobody's been in it, and they're still arguing.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I vanished again! If anybody is following this, I apologise. I'm trying to move to a new city right now...I'm excited to move in with my boyfriend, but searching for a new flat is my least favourite thing to do ever. So much disappointment and stress! I feel like a crazy person.   
> Aptly, the song for this chapter is _Thought I Was A Spaceman_ by Blur. There's a high chance I have no idea what this song is about, but there's something about the sound of it that feels nicely alienated. Enjoyable.


	12. Lust For Life

The sole of one of his shoes is working its way loose, and it makes him bring that foot down unnaturally hard with every step, stamping through the city. His bass guitar in its case knocks painfully against the bones in his spine, and a filthy, soot-smelling rain is sifting down onto his face and soaking through his hair as he looks blindly around, trying to get his bearings in this place he's never been before. Apart from his bass he's only carrying one suitcase, and it's light; apart from his tapes and a few items of clothing, he doesn't have much. It's weird how easily his life, all seventeen years of it, can be packed up. He thinks of the things he's left behind: the rock posters still taped to his bedroom walls, the one or two empty beer bottles rolling around in the bottom of his closet, a few cigarette butts pitched out of the window. He didn't take his cassette deck because he reasoned it was too heavy; he regrets that already. Without it the tapes rattle uselessly in his bag, like cicada husks.

Tucked into the inside pocket of his jacket is just under ¥134,000 that he saved up from his various part-time jobs and time spent running errands around the neighbourhood during the summer – and, if he's honest, some of which he squirrelled out of his grandmother's handbag – less the ¥6,000 or so that he dropped on the eight hour bus ride from Nagano to Osaka. It seemed like a huge sum before he left, but now that he's here he feels stupid and panicky; is it possible he can even last a month on it? Shelter, and food? Probably not. He makes some estimates, does some quick mental calculations and winces.

He doesn't have a watch on, but the sky is getting dark, and the neon signs are looking more vivid. He knows he's making himself look every inch the naïve country boy he really is, but he can't help but stand still in the middle of the pavement and gawk up at them, his dark eyes wide and his too-long hair sticking damply to his neck; after so many wasted hours spent dreaming about it, here he is. The lights reflecting off him are blue and green and pink and red and orange, flickering in his eyes; the air smells like dirty rain and car exhaust and food being cooked; crepes and takoyaki and steamed buns. He's not eaten in hours but he's never felt less hungry in his life: it feels like he's full up of this, of this huge city, racing and pulsing and flashing all around him. The crowd of people is parting around him, the occasional elbow knocking against his bass and rocking him temporarily off-balance; sometimes a foot or a knee catches his suitcase, held limply by his own legs. He doesn't snap out of it, though, until he feels something actually intentionally touching his bass, at which point his sense of self-preservation kicks in and he whirls around suspiciously.

 

He has to adjust his gaze several feet lower; standing in front of him is a very, very young kid, one arm still outstretched where he was touching the instrument case. He looks up at Toshiya and lets it drop back down by his side, a solemn expression on his face.

Where are his parents? This kid is surely too young to be out alone, and Toshiya stares at him uneasily. He's so young his face doesn't appear fully formed yet; he's maybe three or four. There's something strangely familiar about him, as though Toshiya has seen this kid before, but of course that's impossible.

'Hi,' he says uncertainly, but the little boy just continues to stare up at him in silence. Toshiya's never been around young children before, and he's not sure how much this one should be talking. What age do kids start talking at, anyway? Maybe he can't yet, but that doesn't feel right. He's standing pretty confidently upright, after all, and his clothes aren't baby clothes; jeans, a sweater, and sneakers with trailing laces. Toshiya points at them.

'Your laces are undone,' he says. 'You don't want to trip.'

The kid glances briefly down at his shoes and then goes back to staring raptly at Toshiya's face. Sighing softly, Toshiya squats down and reaches out, tying the kid's laces for him; maybe he's not old enough to do that, either.

'There,' he says, knotting them securely. Squatting down he's near enough at eye level with the kid, and he frowns slightly, wondering why he looks so recognisable.

'You need help?' he asks cautiously, and just like that the kid spins away and vanishes, squeezing himself back into the maze of grown-up legs; Toshiya curses softly and gets to his feet, straining to look for him over the shoulders of all the people walking by. He thinks he sees a glimpse of him by the buildings that line the side of the pavement, the various stalls and shopfronts, all brightly lit up; he thinks he sees a tiny hand reaching up for the brass knob of a door pressed in between a clothing store and a Family Mart – there are little lit-up buzzers on it with nameplates, so he guesses it must go to an apartment building, maybe where the kid lives – but the weirdest thing; he sees the door open and the top of the kid's glossy head as he steps through, but at the same time, it's almost like he doesn't step through.

Instead, it's almost like he just disappears. And the door is closed too quickly, like it never opened before, and Toshiya realises that he can't remember anything about the room inside the doorway; even whether there were lights on or not. It's more like a void; a complete and total blank in his memory, even though it just happened.

Shivering, Toshiya gives his head a shake, telling himself that he's tired and overwhelmed and reading too much into things. It works, kind of.

 

An hour later, he finds himself in a bar, his eighth or ninth of the night. It's a Tuesday but even so the place isn't empty; all the tables are occupied and there's a line of three or four people waiting to be served. With his hair loose and wet around his face and his luggage with him he knows he must look ragged and unkempt but he has to try; striding up to the bar, he waits impatiently for the bartender – a young man, every bit as tall as Toshiya is but with lividly red hair – to turn to him.

'Yup?' he says automatically, and then eyes Toshiya closely. 'You're not twenty.'

Toshiya bites his lip. 'Any jobs going here?' he asks, trying to make his voice sound confident.

'Jobs,' the bartender says, rolling the word around like he's never heard it before in his life, and Toshiya fiddles awkwardly with the strap of his guitar case.

'I need a job,' he repeats, a little clearer, but the redhead just gazes at him curiously. Toshiya wonders if _everybody_ in Osaka just has this habit of just staring when you talk to them.

'What's in there?' the bartender asks abruptly, nodding towards the guitar case on Toshiya's back.

'Uh—'

The bartender rolls his eyes. 'Guitar or bass?'

'Bass.'

' _Bass_.' He nods his head in a weird, rhythmic sort of way. 'You any good?'

'Oh, um—'

'You playing with anybody right now? A band or anything?'

Toshiya glances down at the suitcase in his hand, wondering how much of a moron this guy is. 'No,' he says, 'I just moved here.'

'Oh? When?'

Toshiya shrugs. 'About an hour and a half ago.'

The bartender cracks a grin. 'Far out. I thought you sounded country.'

For some reason Toshiya blushes at that, but the bartender shakes his head: 'It's not an insult. I'm from the country too; I've just lived here a while now. So, you got someplace to stay?'

A customer behind Toshiya clears his throat impatiently and the bartender rolls his eyes. 'Stay there,' he says to Toshiya – as if he has anywhere else to go – and gets busy for a few minutes, pouring drinks and shoving them across the bar at the guy in a manner that borders on rude; he plucks the man's cash from his hands and doesn't bother giving him change. He turns back to Toshiya with a thoughtful look on his face.

'My name's Die,' he says abruptly, 'And you didn't answer me. Two questions: you any good with that bass, and do you have a place to stay?'

Toshiya swallows. 'I'm Hara. And I don't have anywhere to stay yet.'

 _Yet_ , he thinks a little bitterly: that's optimistic. He forces himself to stand a little straighter. 'And – I am pretty good, actually, yeah.'

Die breaks into a megawatt smile. 'Don't look so scared,' he says, and Toshiya sort of stiffens up his shoulders.

'I'm not.'

'Very good,' Die says approvingly, and gives Toshiya a wink. ' _Almost_ convinced me.'

 

When Toshiya stumbles out of the bar a few minutes later, he has a piece of paper bearing a name, an address and a list very precise instructions, all delivered in Die's almost illegible script. He has almost no idea what he's doing, but he's been suffused with a weird sense of floaty calm: he realises that when you don't have a home, there's no such thing as being lost. It's not exactly freeing – he's aware he's standing tense as a wire, and whenever he breathes too sharply he feels something like an iron band around his lungs, squeezing them painfully – but it is at least countering the panic: he has the comforting sense that he's fallen now, and that he can't fall any further.

He boards the subway as per Die's instructions, his eyes flickering up nervously to check and recheck the signs; he's never been on a subway before in his life and he's surprised by how much it jolts around and how difficult it is to stand upright. Nobody else seems to be having trouble. He plants his feet slightly wider than shoulder width apart and teaches his body how to roll with the motions of the train, rather than struggling against them. He stays vigilant for the different station announcements and gets off at Dōbutsuen-mae. From there Die has drawn him a rather scribbly sort of map, and Toshiya pauses at the mouth of the station, gazing at it in confusion. The streets in front of him look nothing like the map, and none of the names are familiar. The panic is back now, like an old friend: he feels it rising in the back of his throat with a sour sort of taste.

Somebody says his name in a bored sort of voice, and unsteadily Toshiya looks up.

'Hara?' the voice says again, sounding slightly irritated this time. It belongs to a short man with wisps of blond hair escaping from beneath a woollen beanie; his ears glint with multiple metal piercings. His face is set into a frown that looks more or less permanent.

'Yeah,' Toshiya says nervously, 'That's me. Are you...' he looks down at the paper even though he has the name memorised, 'Kyo?'

'Yeah,' the short man says gruffly. 'Die called. Said you're a bassist.'

'Yeah.'

'Our band needs a bassist,' Kyo says. His voice is sort of grudging, and he folds his arms over his chest. He's looking at Toshiya with interest, but it's an aggressive sort of interest that makes Toshiya want to shrink back; his eyes are sharp and they rake over every inch of him.

Still: 'Die said that maybe I could stay with you,' Toshiya says anxiously, wondering what exactly Die is on and how delusional it makes him. Maybe this whole thing is a weird set-up and he's going to end up sold to a ring of pornographers or cannibals or something. Maybe he'll end up lying naked on the middle of a table whilst businessmen eat sushi off his naked body. Maybe—

'Yeah,' Kyo says uncaringly. 'If you're a good bassist.'

He turns and starts to walk away, and uncertainly Toshiya tags along behind, struggling slightly with his luggage; Kyo walks fast and seems to know where he's going, leading Toshiya through a maze of side-streets and alleyways. There's actual graffiti on some of the walls here; Toshiya's never seen that before. There's rubbish around, too, which is new. A lot of people seem to just be sitting on the streets and looking vacantly ahead, and Toshiya keeps stumbling over his own feet because he's trying to take everything in, looking in a thousand directions at once whilst still moving forward. He trips and only just keeps himself upright; flushing hotly, he looks up to see Kyo waiting for him some metres ahead, a strange sort of look on his face. He's standing up against a very nondescript looking wooden door, which he nudges open with his foot. He gestures Toshiya inside rudely.

He doesn't know it yet, of course, but the building he steps into will be his home for the next four years of his life.

 

'You can stay,' Kyo is telling him in that gruff voice he has, 'For one night. Tomorrow we'll try you out with the band; if you're good, you can stay longer. I have a six month lease on this place. I'm not planning on renewing it.' He lights up a cigarette and puffs on it savagely.

The apartment is tiny; it's only about twice as large as Toshiya's bedroom at his grandmother's place. There's a tiny strip of kitchen and then two single beds, one messy and one completely bare, the mattress making a tinny sort of sound when Kyo thumps it. 'Sleep here,' he says, and jerks a stiff thumb at a door behind him. 'Bathroom's through there, just a shower though. You want a bath, there's a bathhouse down the street that's clean.' He pauses. 'You smoke?'

'Yeah,' Toshiya says, and Kyo throws him the pack. It's a fairly big lie; at this point Toshiya has smoked about one cigarette total in his life, made up of little puffs of Kaoru's, here and there when the other man will let him, which isn't often. Most of the time, it's Toshiya stealing the cigarette out of his hands and taking a drag before Kaoru has a chance to react. Now he lights his own cigarette for the first time, pulling the smoke into his lungs the way Kaoru does and forcing himself not to cough. It feels like an initiation; he eyes the cigarette with a hint of pride. When he lets the smoke out, it makes an impressively large grey-blue cloud in the air, and he smiles. He wonders when Kaoru finds him here. He's not worried: he knows it's going to happen.

 

They've had sex nine times now; in Toshiya's bedroom, in the woods, in the field in the middle of the night. That time was the most recent, Kaoru slipping inside him in the field where they first met, one small hand pressing gently over his mouth to muffle the noises he made and the other stroking a soothing pattern over his hip. With the older man's hands on his body and the jolts of excitement running through him every time Kaoru's cock thrust inside him, he'd let his head fall back on the grass and his fingers grip tightly at Kaoru's back under his shirt, and he'd thought fiercely: _goodbye to all this. Goodbye field; goodbye woods; goodbye Nagano_.

That had been last night, and it made him almost giddy to think of how far he'd come in such a short space of time.

They'd cum together; that had been the amazing thing. He'd done some research – or more accurately, a large amount of experimentation – and learnt that if he grips the base of his cock tightly, he can put off cumming.

It's a fascinating development.

The grass prickling at his body, his breath coming out in high little panting sounds, he'd done it, his fingers trembling harshly around his own skin, and he'd felt it as his own body became almost overwhelmed, his hips bucking up uncontrollably to meet Kaoru's thrusts and his heart thudding in his chest. He'd heard Kaoru groan, and his movements start to become more erratic, and then the older man had knocked his hand aside and replaced it with his own, pumping his cock desperately, and— the feeling had been so strong and so sudden Toshiya had almost yelled; his own orgasm hitting him as a Kaoru made a sound like a growl and clutched at his thigh. He thinks he'll never forget it; the sudden rush of warmth deep inside him; Kaoru pushing himself deep as he could possibly go; the way their bodies sort of collapsed together at the end. The best thing in the world.

Kyo is staring at him curiously and his cheeks colour hotly; the cigarette is half burned down and he realises that he's been more or less staring vacantly into space for at least a few minutes, completely lost in his own thoughts, and that he's definitely at least semi-hard. He drops the hand holding the cigarette down in front of his own crotch casually, hoping it's not noticeable.

'How many in your band?' he asks inanely. Kyo stares at him silently for a minute.

'Three,' he answers at last. 'Die, guitar. Shinya, drums.' He taps himself on the chest, 'Vocals.' He pauses, eyeing Toshiya critically, 'You'll audition with us tomorrow afternoon, when Shinya gets out of school.'

' _School_?' Toshiya asks incredulously, and Kyo gives him a flat sort of look.

'That's where you go to learn to read and do maths and stuff.'

Forgetting himself, Toshiya gives him a withering look; it's not as dangerous as he would have thought though, because something close to a smile twitches at the corners of Kyo's mouth. He finds himself wondering who in the world this weird little man is, but he can't exactly ask that.

'How old are you?' he asks instead, his tone curious.

'Nineteen,' Kyo asks promptly. 'Die's twenty. Shinya's sixteen. You?'

For an insane moment Toshiya considers lying, but he decides against it. 'Seventeen.'

If Kyo's surprised, he doesn't show it; he simply lights up another cigarette.

'One more thing,' he says gruffly. 'If you're good, if you fit, you're in the band. Yes?'

It's a mild relief that somebody is asking him, at last – as if he has any choice in the matter. Toshiya nods nervously, and Kyo sits down on the messy bed. 'You join the band, you become one of us,' he says simply. 'Family. I'm not calling you by your last name. Either give me your first name or choose something you want to go by.'

'It's Toshimasa. I mean – Toshiya, everyone calls me Toshiya.'

It's another pretty big lie. Everybody at school has always called him Toshimasa; his family, for the most part, have avoided calling him at all. It's only Kaoru, he realises, who calls him by his chosen name.

'Right,' Kyo says harshly. 'Toshiya if you're in. Hara if you're out.'

 

It's Toshiya.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Lust For Life_ is by Iggy Pop and, like most Iggy Pop songs, kind of needs no introduction or explanation.


	13. No Distance Left To Run

After the rainy start, the day has cleared and turned sunny and fresh. They walk through Tennōji Park, not holding hands but keeping so close their hips and thighs keep brushing, and the breeze blows blossom into their clothes and their hair, and Kaoru wonders how it's possible to be this happy. Toshiya stops with his eyes closed, feeling the sun on his face and smelling the air; twenty years old, he's over his hangover already. Kaoru just watches him; thinks to himself as if he's thinking it for the first time: he's so beautiful.

'I'm sorry I couldn't be there,' Kaoru says gently, smoothing an errant strand of hair behind Toshiya's ear. Toshiya shrugs, smiling down at him.

'It's not important,' he says, 'You're here now.'

'Was it a good party?'

'Probably not as cool as parties in the future,' Toshiya says, his lips twisting wryly as he gives his hip a deliberate bump against Kaoru's. 'It was fun. We drank too much.'

'Feel like an adult now?'

'Hardly. I feel more like a kid than ever.'

He laughs, but not really like anything is funny; he tips his head back, scrutinising the blue of the sky, and absent-mindedly starts biting at his thumbnail. Kaoru glances down at his own body, feeling self-conscious; tattoos like his aren't all that common in Toshiya's time, and he's getting a few guarded looks slid his way. Before leaving Toshiya's apartment he had to swap the T-shirt he was wearing for one of Toshiya's – his own was advertising a band that doesn't exist yet – and it's too big on him, the sleeves ending loosely just above his elbows and the hem falling past his hips.

'So something weird happened,' Toshiya says, his voice just a little strained, and Kaoru glances up at him. He looks at the pale skin and the shadows under the eyes and wonders, for the first time, if it's just hangover he's seeing or something else; Toshiya's teeth continue to tug at his nail and Kaoru pulls his hand away from his mouth gently.

'Yeah?' he asks, and Toshiya gives a lop-sided shrug.

'Yeah. It's just...before you got here, last night – or, this morning, I mean...Kyo came onto me.'

 

He tangles his own fingers together anxiously, his eyes flicking up to Kaoru's face to check the expression there, a sort of emotional weather forecast; Kaoru's features are impassive, but there's a stiffness to his shoulders that wasn't there before, and his steps along the path are slowing.

'I see,' he says carefully, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere just below Toshiya's lips. 'Was it...did you— I mean—' he interrupts himself with an abrupt silence, pressing his lips together. In the middle of the path, he comes to a complete stop, and Toshiya steps edgily out of the way of the group of people coming up behind them.

'It wasn't reciprocated,' he says gently, quickly, 'Of course. I mean...' he sweeps a nervous hand through his hair, 'He took me home, after the party; him and Die. But I decided to go up to the roof, to watch the sunrise.' He swallows. 'We – it wasn't really a fight, but we talked about you.'

'All good things, I assume,' Kaoru says, an odd sort of joke because neither of them feel like smiling. Toshiya feels his own fingernails dig into the skin at the back of his neck.

'He put me to bed,' he says in a tense voice, 'And...and he kissed me.'

Kaoru blinks up at his eyes quickly before his gaze returns, steady and level, to his chin. 'In bed?' he asks, his voice careful, and Toshiya gives a nod that looks more like a flinch.

'I pushed him away,' he says in a quiet voice, 'I think I hurt him. I – I guess there was half a second before I pushed him back, but only because...' he breaks off helplessly, shaking his head. 'Only because I was drunk, and I...I've been missing you, so much. I've been...pretty lonely.'

Kaoru lets out a long breath. The breeze catches his hair, long and dark brown at present, and he pushes it out of his face vaguely.

'Was he drunk?'

'No, not drunk. He doesn't drink.'

Kaoru gives a faint nod. 'Is he even...?'

'Gay? No.' Toshiya laughs nervously, 'No, he's completely straight, as far as I know. Knew.'

Kaoru nods. He closes his eyes for something longer than a blink, and Toshiya reaches out for his hand.

'Kaoru,' he says gently, 'I know you like to think things through in your own time, but will you just look at me for a moment? You're scaring me a bit.'

Immediately, Kaoru's eyes open and he pushes a small smile onto his face; he squeezes Toshiya's fingers lightly.

'There's nothing to be scared of.'

'Are you...' Toshiya hesitates, struggling to read the weird look in his lover's eyes, 'Angry with me?'

Another squeeze of his hand; more reassuring this time. Kaoru starts walking again.

'Of course not,' he says, his voice low and soft, 'You didn't do anything wrong. Neither of you did.'

Toshiya falters, his hand tensing slightly in Kaoru's. 'He knows I'm with you,' he says uncomfortably. 'He knows—'

'He knows I'm hardly ever around,' Kaoru says gently. 'He knows I disappear all the time. I can't blame him for trying, Toshiya.' He smiles a little sadly, 'You're very easy to fall in love with.'

 

When they get to the bridge Toshiya steers them off the path and into the copse of trees, where it's cooler; the sunlight is dappled on the ground and the air smells like damp earth. His big hands skim carefully up over Kaoru's hips and mould to the shape of his waist; they guide him back up against the trunk of a tree and Toshiya inclines his head. In the split-second before their lips touch he catches the smell of Kaoru's skin, and he can't help but give a small sigh.

His lips are the same as they have always been; such a precise shape; so soft; the taste of them so familiar. Kaoru's breath catches a little in his throat, and his darkly inked hand curls around Toshiya's cheek.

No matter how many times he has kissed Toshiya over the years, he thinks, the feeling never alters; the contrast between the wiry strength of his body and the softness of his lips. The feeling like all the blood is coming back into his veins, suffusing him slowly with warmth; the feeling of fitting.

He feels the gentle smile on Toshiya's lips as he deepens the kiss.

When they part, he meets the younger man's expectant gaze and thinks about his eyes at twenty compared to how they looked at six, twelve, fifteen; how they're still dark, still beautiful, but not exactly as innocent as they once were. Kaoru's fault, of course. He strokes through Toshiya's hair, smoothing the familiar strands between his fingers.

He thinks about how by the time he moves to Osaka this park has been almost completely destroyed to make way for more apartment blocks – that the zoo is gone and the pond has been filled and the lacy looking white-painted bridge was hacked up and dumped in a skip at some point during the 2030s.

'Have you spoken to him yet?' he asks, and Toshiya shakes his head.

'No. He took off before I woke up.'

Kaoru's hands follow the path of Toshiya's hair down to his shoulders; they pause there a moment before running down his arms to where his hands still hold Kaoru's waist. Carefully, he pushes them from his body and holds them instead.

'How do you feel about him?' he asks a little awkwardly, and Toshiya gives a little flinch, like Kaoru's words have hit at him.

'We're friends,' he says firmly, 'That's all.'

'No, I mean...' Kaoru swallows, looking strangely nervous, 'If it wasn't for me; if it wasn't for us. Do you think you could feel the same about him?'

'Kaoru,' Toshiya says, his tone disbelieving and, underneath it, a little hurt, 'What are you getting at?'

Kaoru falters, his grip limp on Toshiya's hands. 'I think you should consider it,' he says, his voice quiet but very clear.

Toshiya takes a step backward on the muddy ground. The distance pulls his hands out of Kaoru's.

'What?' he says simply, his voice rough with shock. He shakes his head; clutches at a nervous handful of his own hair.

'He's here,' Kaoru says carefully, a miserable sort of tension in his eyes, 'This is his time; his and yours. He won't vanish all the time, Toshiya. You'll never have to miss him. And...' Kaoru shrugs brokenly, 'He cares for you, Toshiya. It's been – easier for me, having to leave you, knowing he's here to look after you. He's...' he pauses, as if it's difficult, 'He's a good man.'

Wordless, Toshiya fumbles for a cigarette and sticks it between his lips. His hands are trembling; he has to chase the tip of the cigarette with his lighter flame before he can get it lit up.

'I don't want anybody else,' he says, his voice quiet and splintery-sounding. 'I would rather have you for one day than somebody else for the rest of my life, don't you get that?'

'Toshiya—'

'Do you think you're being noble?' he interrupts, 'Do you think you're being a good person, offering to give me up?' He shakes his head wearily, 'Kaoru, I love you. I know what you're trying to do, but when you say you could live without me, it hurts. Because I couldn't live without you.'

He glances up sadly, gives a weak shrug before dropping his gaze back to the ground. His cigarette burns ignored between his fingers.

 

Standing by the tree, Kaoru wants to reach for him but he feels frozen. He wants a cigarette of his own, but his hands curl numbly by his sides, empty without Toshiya's long fingers nestled against them.

'You deserve better,' he says woodenly, and when Toshiya looks up at him again, his eyes are red-rimmed.

'The only thing I deserve,' he says in a hoarse voice, 'Is to be taken seriously. Kaoru, I'm not a kid any more. I know what I'm doing.'

' _Do_ you?' Kaoru asks. 'Toshiya, do you realise that there's no guarantee you'll ever see me again after today? I could get hit by a car tomorrow and there's no way you'd ever know; I could carry on opening every door I see and still never, _ever_ end up back in your time.'

'Don't you think I already know that?' Toshiya says exasperatedly, 'I've known you since I was six, Kaoru. I've known about your travelling since I was eleven. Do you seriously think the idea that I might never see you again hasn't occurred to me in all that time? What, do you think I'm _stupid_?'

'Toshiya, I don't think you're stupid, I—'

'I think about it all the time,' Toshiya interrupts, his voice clear and sharp. 'How one day is going to be the last time I'll ever see you, and how I might not even know it for a really long time. Don't you realise that every time you go away, I think that? That I end up just – _tearing_ through all my memories,' he says, making a violent ripping gesture with one shaking hand, 'Trying to figure out the oldest I've ever seen you; trying to work out how much life you get, so I know if I'll get a chance to see you again?'

'But this is my point,' Kaoru says desperately, 'This isn't what I want for you, Toshiya.'

'What about what I want? Does that matter?'

'Of course it matters!'

'So listen to me,' Toshiya says, his voice strained. 'Kaoru, there's no debate about this. It's you or it's nobody for me. That's just the way it is.'

The silence between them is heavy. Toshiya stubs out his cigarette and leans back against a tree, letting his head fall into his hands; Kaoru stands still, a ripped-up feeling in his chest, like something is bleeding.

'You're so young,' he says at last, each word an effort, 'To make that choice.'

'That's the thing,' Toshiya says tiredly, 'It isn't a choice. It never has been.' He shrugs limply, 'You're the one for me.'

'Toshiya—'

'No.' He shuts him up, glaring, 'You don't understand. You've _always_ been here, do you get that? I don't know anybody like I know you. There's a reason for this whole thing, can't you – can't you _see_ that?'

His voice sounds a little desperate as he breaks off, and Kaoru does about the worst thing possible: he shrugs helplessly.

'There's always a choice,' he says quietly, and Toshiya crosses his arms over his chest.

'So what,' he asks, his voice soft, 'is this you making it?'

'I just want you to consider it.'

'You just want me to consider being with somebody else. Right.' Toshiya's face contorts into a grim smile, and he looks off to the side sharply. 'God, you're an asshole sometimes.'

He lights a new cigarette and touches it to his lips shakily.

'Toshiya—'

The younger man just shakes his head wordlessly. A tear falls down his cheek.

 

They stand like that for a long time, neither of them speaking, the day gradually growing less golden around them. They smoke, off and on, and a few times it seems that Toshiya might be about to say something, but he doesn't.

They can hear the hum of the city around them, the occasional splash of the fat koi surfacing in the pond nearby. An aeroplane drones overhead and Kaoru glances up, following its passage through the visible patches of sky between the leaves. He hasn't seen one flying like this in a few years: the new planes are much faster but they have to go higher; it's rare that you see them unless you live near an airport.

Finally Toshiya says: 'Did you see it, in the future?'

Kaoru shoves his hands into his pockets awkwardly. 'See what?' he asks, and Toshiya sniffs and blots his eye with the back of his hand.

'Me and Kyo, together. Or me and anyone.'

'Ah,' Kaoru says quietly. 'No, I didn't.'

'Right.' Toshiya nods shakily. 'So why...?'

'I don't know if you get to change it or not,' Kaoru says carefully, 'But it was worth...'

'A try. Right.'

Toshiya nods woodenly. 'You ever tried to change the future before?'

'No. Not exactly.'

'Not _exactly_.'

'I used to try to warn you of things,' Kaoru says painfully, 'When you were a kid. Warn you not to go off with strangers, stuff like that.'

'I remember,' Toshiya says in a soft voice, and gives another small sniff. 'Did it work?'

Kaoru shrugs in a tense kind of way. 'I don't know. There's no way of knowing what would have happened to you if we'd never met, so I don't know.'

'Remember the night you showed up in my village, in the snow? When my parents were...' he makes a clumsy sort of gesture and Kaoru nods.

'I remember.'

'I was going to run away, that night. That was my plan. If you hadn't showed up, I would've done.' He takes a meditative drag of his cigarette. 'Sometimes I think they never would have even noticed.'

Turning towards Kaoru a little, he smiles wryly. 'I needed you,' he says plainly, 'So much, when I was a kid. It was like I wasn't properly formed without somebody loving me like that, and because you were the only one, I moulded entirely around you. That's the shape my heart made.' He shrugs jaggedly. 'That's why nobody else fits.'

'So you were doomed,' Kaoru says, and Toshiya laughs humourlessly.

'Something like that.'

The sun is going down; the reddish light of it keeps glinting off the scanty flashes of pond visible through the trees. Toshiya hugs his arms around himself and gives a light shiver.

'I should go home,' he says in a small voice, and Kaoru nods.

'Will Kyo be there?'

'I don't know. Not yet, probably.' Toshiya sighs, running a hand through his hair. 'Walk me back?'

 

Kaoru does, keeping a companionable silence next to him in the dying light, and when they reach Toshiya's building and notice the brass doorknob on the outside door, they touch hands together gently.

For Kaoru, it feels panicky: too soon. There are still so many hurt feelings between them; things he needs to say to Toshiya that he can't quite figure out. He's aware that he's let the younger man down, but he doesn't know how to make it right; in the face of that innocently glinting doorknob, he feels helpless.

'I suppose I should...'

'Yeah,' Toshiya says quietly, 'I suppose you should.'

His eyes are red-rimmed again. He gives a sober nod and steps back, giving Kaoru room, his arms clutched protectively around his own body. Reluctantly, Kaoru reaches for the doorknob, feels its hateful familiarity against his palm.

'So between you and Kyo,' he says suddenly, his voice steady but his eyes miserable. 'Nothing...nothing's going to happen, is it?'

The look Toshiya gives him is weary.

'No,' he says. 'Nothing's going to happen.'

'Right,' Kaoru says uncomfortably.

Impossible to explain, the fear inside him: the damage he's done. He hesitates. 'I love you,' he says.

Toshiya's voice is hoarse, almost too quiet to be heard. 'I love you too.'

He opens the door, and the scene changes.

 

Where he vanishes, Toshiya is left behind. He stands still on the street for a minute, his vision blurry with tears, and then he blinks and it clears and his own building resolves itself in front of him, the door ugly and scratched up as ever and now with just a small hole where a handle of some sort used to be, the way it has been every day since he moved in.

Scrubbing the tears from his cheeks, he goes through it and climbs the stairs mechanically. His lungs feel heavy when he gets to his floor; he's smoked too much. He's almost out of cigarettes, and his head spins a little; when he jams his key into the lock he fumbles it.

Inside, it's silent and still. The place always looks smaller when it's so empty. He takes his shoes off at the door and then simply perches on the edge of his bed, gripping at the duvet as if it's going to keep him in place; he sits, and he smokes even though it makes him dizzy, and he waits as the sun goes down and the night deepens and the hour grows later. He thinks, as much as he can, of nothing. His hands shake, and whenever he catches himself crying he wipes the tears away impatiently.

It's gone midnight before Kyo is back. Toshiya's still sitting when he hears the apologetic scrape of his key in the door, and the smaller man gives him an edgy glance before bending to take off his shoes.

'Hello,' he says shortly.

'Hi.'

There's a beat of silence, and then Kyo looks at him closer.

'You okay?' he asks suspiciously, and Toshiya bites his lip.

'I need to tell you something,' he says. He thinks he catches a flash of fear in Kyo's eyes, but dutifully his friend takes a seat on the bed opposite him. His posture is uncomfortable; he leans forward on his knees stiffly.

'It's about Kaoru,' Toshiya says, and pauses. His dark gaze finds Kyo's; finds it, and holds it. 'He's a time traveller,' he says.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _No Distance Left To Run_ is another one by Blur. It's incredibly mournful. I was never really into Blur until my boyfriend got me into them; he loves Damon Albarn. This was the first song he sent me (along with _On Melancholy Hill_ by Albarn's other project, Gorillaz) because 'you like sad songs'. Buddy, I do.


	14. D.A.R.L.I.N.G

He's asleep, but he's not asleep. Something happens and it's like opening his eyes, but not exactly. It's more like opening the eyes inside his mind.

It's entirely white, and there's no feeling of his bed or the sheets around him; he's wearing his sleepwear, he's pretty sure – underwear and a T-shirt – but his body feels oddly formless, like the most solid kind of ghost; like he's made of smoke. He walks forward, but there's no feeling of floor beneath his bare feet, and there's no feeling of limitation: no walls, no ceiling, not even any sky; just that endless white.

And then the door.

He walks towards it mechanically. With one hand he touches its smooth surface; traces his fingertips over the metal hinges. Feeling stupid, he gets down on his knees – a weird sensation without a floor, oddly like falling – and tries to peer beneath it, but of course all he can see is white.

When he dreams of the door, it's often different. He remembers being a kid and having it look like his bedroom door, or like the front door of his house, and sometimes wild shapes like the trunk of a tree or a gravestone. Now that he's twenty-one, those odd shapes are less frequent. The one constant through the years is, of course, the brass doorknob; just slightly duller and more scratched up now than when he was a kid.

This door isn't one he recognises, he thinks – or perhaps it is, but from where, he can't say. It's cheaply made, an unconvincing veneer over chipboard, and when he gives it an experimental tap it sounds hollow and insubstantial. There's a lock on it – not a modern one, a more old-fashioned kind that's obviously made for a metal key – but that doesn't bother Kaoru; he knows it will open for him. The door always opens for him.

It's irresistible, like an itch. He places his hand on the doorknob and gives it a slight turn, feeling the click of the latch from somewhere within the door. What happens at this point? For all the times he's done it, he's never really felt sure: does he step through or get pulled through? Does he walk into a new place, or does the place grow up around him?

The door opens, and he's rushed into the daylight.

 

He's quiet. Blinking sleepily, he rubs his eyes. He can hear traffic noise, faintly, and the sound of running water.

He lets his hands drop from his face and lets them settle lightly against the door he's just walked through, his back pressed against it. It's an apartment, a tiny studio apartment, with two single beds – one made, one not – and a solitary window throwing a bright patch of sunshine onto the floor. He's been here before, but it's different in the daylight. He runs a hand through his hair, feeling where it's ruffled and messy from sleep; he glances down at himself and wishes he was wearing something more appropriate.

His heart is going too fast, and he tries to take deep breaths.

He waits until the sound of water cuts out, and then it's a few more minutes before the bathroom door opens; a huge billow of steam unfurls from it and, as if produced from the mist, there appears a tall, skinny young man with a towel around his waist. His hair is soaking, sticking to his face and neck and shoulders, and his skin glistens and has a warm glow to it; it must have been a hot shower.

Kaoru makes some small noise, and Toshiya jumps slightly. He almost loses his grip on his towel but clutches at it, pulling it more firmly around his waist; he pushes wet hair back from his face and gives Kaoru a gentle smile.

'Hi,' he says.

'Hi,' Kaoru echoes woodenly. Toshiya's standing still, dripping all over the floor, and now that he's recovered from his momentary start he looks calm, completely unfazed by the near stranger who's just materialised in his apartment. His face has a look like he's trying not to smile too much or too widely; he's not being very successful. Kaoru presses his hand a little harder against the wall, reassuring himself of its solidity.

'Sorry for how I'm dressed,' he says uncomfortably, and there's that look on Toshiya's face again: like he's fighting against a grin and the grin is winning.

'I don't think I'm in any position to criticise your clothes.'

His voice is warm and despite his nerves, Kaoru smiles. 'I suppose not.' He hesitates, fighting the urge to cross his hands protectively over his groin. 'You don't seem surprised to see me.'

It's odd, the look Toshiya gives him: like he's never loved anything quite so much.

'You told me you were coming,' he says softly.

 

It takes a lot of effort; not thinking about how weird that is. For a moment Kaoru just stares at him quietly, trying to get his mind to accept what Toshiya's telling him: it's not as if he's never seen himself in the future, of course – he can cope with that without having a minor freak out, mostly – but the idea of his future self talking to Toshiya, talking about _him_ , is weirder than he can really say. It's only when he remembers that Toshiya's still hanging onto his towel that he realises that the intensity of his stare is probably bordering on rude, and he hastily turns to face the wall.

'Sorry,' he mutters, 'You can get dressed. I won't look.'

There's a pause. 'Thanks.'

Facing the wall, he hears Toshiya drop his towel; hears the gentle pad of his feet on the floor as he moves around, rummaging through drawers. It's strange, the effect it has – knowing that he's naked, completely naked right behind him – and Kaoru bites down on his lower lip as he tries to stop his mind from wandering where it shouldn't go: last time he was here, and the feeling of Toshiya's clothed erection pressing against his hip; the feeling of the other man's lips on his. He can hear clothing slipping over bare skin: the first man he's ever touched. The _only_ man. His hands shake a little, and he wishes he had pockets to jam them into; in just his underwear and T-shirt, he feels vulnerable, and he wraps his arms around himself a little miserably. His heart won't slow down its frenzied hammering, and he feels a little sick.

'Here.'

He jumps at the hand on his shoulder and turns: Toshiya's in front of him, fully dressed now and with his wet hair roughly combed through. He's holding out a soft bundle of clothing, which Kaoru accepts gratefully. 'They're my smallest jeans,' Toshiya says, an apologetic tone in his voice, 'If you wear a belt with them and roll them up, they might be okay.'

'Right,' Kaoru says, feeling oddly breathless, 'Thanks.' He hugs the bundle to his chest but makes no move to start dressing, and Toshiya gives him a curious look.

The clothes smell like him; his skin, the scent of whatever laundry detergent he uses. Kaoru studies them, resists the urge to lower his face into them and smell them; they smell good. They smell familiar in a way that they shouldn't; not when he's only met this person once before in his life. They trigger a memory he doesn't quite have; something that slips away from him when he tries to hold tighter to it. Slowly he begins sorting them, stepping into the jeans whilst Toshiya tactfully turns away and busies himself with something – they're much too long, but Toshiya's hips are pretty skinny, so the fit isn't dreadful.

'How old was I?' he asks, feeling awkward about the silence even though Toshiya seems perfectly comfortable. He turns, meeting Kaoru's eyes, and Kaoru hastens to fasten the jeans over his crotch.

'You were fifty-six,' he says casually, and Kaoru's fingers fumble the job.

' _Fifty_ - _six_?'

'Mmhm.' Toshiya smiles at him, a different sort of smile than earlier – it's a little more sensual, a little more secretive.

'I've never...I haven't met myself that old yet.' Kaoru extracts a sweater from where it's become tangled up with a belt and tugs it over his head, appreciating the brief moment of having his face hidden.

'It's a good age for you,' Toshiya says softly. Kaoru makes a face.

'It's so _old_.'

'It's really not,' Toshiya laughs, 'You look good. And you're pretty...' embarrassed, he does a vague sort of gesture. 'Pretty energetic,' he finishes lamely.

'“Energetic”?'

Toshiya raises his eyebrows and Kaoru blushes hard, suddenly grasping his meaning. Ducking his head, he focusses on putting on the belt, tugging on it rather hard than necessary. Toshiya clears his throat quietly.

'I'm not sure if you're hungry,' he says a little timidly, 'But I thought we could go out to eat. I don't have anything to do today, and...' he hesitates, 'You told me it might be a little easier if we kind of pretended that I haven't known you all these years.'

Embarrassed as he is, Kaoru smiles at that. 'First date?' he asks.

'More like a second date,' Toshiya says, looking nervous. 'You _have_ spent an evening with me already.'

'Yeah.' Kaoru stuffs his hands into his pockets, getting some reassurance from the habit. Awkwardly, he shrugs his shoulders. 'I'd like to go and eat with you.'

The look on Toshiya's face is so relieved that Kaoru seems to feel it in his chest, like the other man has touched him; smiling like that, he looks so happy and young and bright that it almost hurts, and that's why Kaoru blurts what he does: 'Since last time, I...'

Toshiya looks at him questioningly, and he lowers his head, staring down at the floor. 'I sort of haven't been able to stop thinking about you,' he confesses, his voice quiet but very clear.

There's a silence, then. The traffic seems very loud outside. Kaoru stares fixedly at the ground as Toshiya's feet pad softly closer, and then a large hand tangles its fingers with his own. Kaoru glances at his face and finds the expression unreadable, sad and hopeful and happy all at once, and he gives the fingers nestled against his palm a gentle squeeze, not really sure what else to do. Toshiya seems on the brink of saying something, but then he sighs softly and forces his mouth into a smile.

'Let's go and get some food, yeah?'

 

So they do. They walk the twenty or so minutes from Toshiya's flat up to Dotonbori, which is weird because it looks like the Dotonbori of the 2040s but also not; the neon signs are still flashing but they're different, and the whole place has smells that Kaoru hasn't experienced since his childhood – petrol cars, meat cooking. Toshiya leads him quite confidently into an okonomiyaki place where they sit at the bar side by side, and when their food is ready and they start eating he laughs at the expression on Kaoru's face – the wide-eyed wonder as his chopsticks relentlessly seek out pieces of pork.

' _Fuck_ ,' he whispers, letting his eyes fall closed, 'I'd kind of – I'd _forgotten_.'

'Meat?' Toshiya grins at him boyishly, 'I know. You go crazy for it.'

'So this was deliberate?' Kaoru says, but he can't even fake being annoyed; he pops in another mouthful and chews blissfully.

'Yeah, I planned it,' Toshiya teases, leaning forward on his elbows, 'I wouldn't dream of feeding you anything else. It's better than the artificial stuff, huh?'

'Much better,' Kaoru says enthusiastically. He takes a sip of beer and straightens up, attempting to drag back a little of his dignity, 'It's not that the artificial meat is bad. It's just...different. Not just the flavour; the texture or something. I'm not sure. I guess even when you're used to it, at the back of your mind you know it's just plants and ground up insects.'

'Mmhm,' Toshiya says smugly, and Kaoru shoots him a look.

'I think you're enjoying this a little too much.'

'It's fun seeing you all blissed out. No more worried frown.' He grins, and Kaoru gives him a bashful smile back.

'I get a frown line in a few years' time,' he says, 'I know.'

'You do.' _And it's sexy_ , Toshiya wants to add, but he bites it back, taking a long swallow of his beer instead. The problem that's starting to present itself is that it's kind of sexy watching Kaoru eat, too, seeing the pleasure on his face and hearing his little groan of enjoyment. Toshiya drains his glass and sets it down on the bar, trying to calm himself. He can feel Kaoru's eyes on him, and his cheeks steadily redden as the older man refills his glass for him.

'I've been worried,' he says quietly, his deep voice sending a little shiver down Toshiya's spine. 'About last time. I...I wasn't exactly great to you. I didn't handle things well. I'm sorry.'

Toshiya smiles at him, resists the urge to take his hand. 'I didn't go easy on you,' he says softly.

'Did I get you in trouble at your work? I mean, you just left with me in the middle of your shift, and...'

'Oh,' Toshiya laughs, shaking his head, 'Yeah, but don't worry about it. It's not as if being a bartender is my life's ambition. It doesn't matter.'

'So what is your ambition?'

'My band,' Toshiya says simply. 'I play bass, and...we're good.'

'What are you called?'

'Dir en grey.'

Kaoru smiles. 'I like it.'

Toshiya smiles back at him. 'Yeah, me too. We need another guitarist. We keep auditioning them, but...' he kicks the rungs of the stool he's sitting on lightly, 'Nobody's been exactly right yet. I know it sounds stupid, but I know the right person is out there. We need someone to...I don't know, pull us together. Lead us.' He smiles, but it's sort of serious, 'Somebody more disciplined.'

'It doesn't sound stupid,' Kaoru says gently. Toshiya knocks their knees together.

 

They talk a lot over their meal, staying on for a few beers after the food; they talk about their childhoods, about Toshiya's band, about music. It's slightly discomfiting for Kaoru, thinking that Toshiya has probably heard everything he's saying before, but the other man doesn't look bored; instead he's leaning towards him, his gaze steady and his dark eyes shining, a small smile tugging at his lips.

By the time they leave, the winter sky is beginning to darken. On the canal the tourist boats are still cruising by, lit up now, and on the opposite bank an opportunistic girl band in home made outfits has set up a small amp and started performing Blondie covers, the sound of their voices ragged and enthusiastic in the chill air.

'So is this a regular second date with you?' Kaoru asks, and Toshiya shrugs as he wraps his jacket tighter around his skinny frame.

'Why, are you enjoying it?'

'Yeah, I am.'

Toshiya looks at him, and his eyes sort of soften. 'I don't go on dates,' he says gently. 'There isn't anybody but you.'

The words settle between them in a way that's not entirely comfortable, and Kaoru bites his lip, buoyed up by the few beers he's drunk.

'Was I your first?' he asks tentatively, hating himself for sounding so abrupt. There's a short pause.

'Yeah, you were.'

'Right. And...' Kaoru rakes an agitated hand through his hair, 'I just...was it okay? I mean—' nervously, he bounces a little on the balls of his feet, 'Was it all right for you?'

Toshiya snorts. 'Are you kidding? It was incredible. I was a horny teenager; you made me cum in about three seconds.'

'You were a teenager?'

Toshiya glances over at him quickly, catching the worried frown on his face again.

'I was ready,' he says in a firm voice. He reaches out for Kaoru's cheek, stroking it a little as he tilts the other man's head up to look at him, and their eye contact holds for a moment before Kaoru breaks it again, looking down at the ground as he nods miserably. Carefully, Toshiya takes his hand.

'I was ready for a long time,' he says, gentler, 'And you made it perfect for me.'

He can tell that Kaoru's still anxious, but he's trying to smile. When he's worried like this he looks older, the type of age Toshiya is more accustomed to seeing him at; it makes him want to wrap his arms around him and pull him close, but he's not sure what's allowed. Tentatively he slips an arm around Kaoru's back, and there's just a moment's hesitation before the older man leans into him, his own hands resting lightly on Toshiya's waist. Toshiya lets his cheek press against Kaoru's head; breathes in the familiar smell of him.

It's funny, how many different places that smell can take him to. It can turn him on, fling him right back to being an adolescent, young and nervous and full of enthusiasm, wanting Kaoru to take his clothes off, wanting Kaoru to _touch_ him; it can take him back to his most frightened moments of childhood, the times when Kaoru would always seem to appear and make it better. A snowy night, being held. Eight years old and slipping whilst climbing a tree; the way the ground seemed to slam into him and how gentle Kaoru was when he touched him, feeling for broken bones. The memory of those hands making their methodical way up his legs makes him feel flushed, now, his cock not hard exactly but feeling heavier between his thighs, more sensitive; a sensation in his stomach like one touch could make him fall again, back into helplessness and into the sheer sensual joy of being touched.

He was never touched enough, he thinks, when he was a kid; but then there was Kaoru. He squeezes him tighter and feels those small, familiar hands rub soothingly against his back, between his shoulder blades. He closes his eyes.

'Kyo's away,' he says, wincing at how indelicate he sounds, 'He's away the whole week; he's in Kyoto. Would you...I mean, you don't have to, but...' he trails off as Kaoru pulls back far enough to look at him, and he sighs softly. 'Come back with me,' he says, blunter. 'Please.'

The older man doesn't answer, but he squeezes his hand, and they set off together through the wintry streets.

 

For Kaoru, the world feels like it's in layers.

It's the kind of thing that could drive him crazy if he doesn't force himself to relax and not question it; the way the hand of this near stranger feels so right in his own, so _familiar_ ; the way Toshiya's smile makes his knees feel weak and starts an odd fluttering sort of feeling inside his belly, as though he's unravelling. Impossible to understand: how a stranger can feel so much like a lover.

That's the confusing thing: the way the world is not just set into layers but the way those layers are blurring, running over and into each other, like Kaoru's remembering things that haven't happened yet. Toshiya tangles their fingers together and he sees it like a flash: their bodies together in a bed, Toshiya's hair tickling his neck and his chest; he catches a flash of his teeth as he talks and sees that same mouth stretched into a grin, a stupid, love-me grin, Toshiya standing next to him on a tiny footbridge that Kaoru's sure he's never seen in his life.

He closes his eyes for something longer than a blink, letting Toshiya lead him up the stairs to his apartment. It's disorienting, the layers, the blurring. Much easier to not try to hold onto it, to give up on understanding – much better to let go.

Toshiya unlocks the front door of his apartment and they're quiet as they set about taking off their shoes and shedding their jackets. They hesitate then, facing each other, and Toshiya takes a tentative step back towards the bed, lightly pulling Kaoru along with him. The older man bites his lip, his cock stirring despite himself; he takes a deep breath, not wanting to get turned on. He's scared what it will do to his judgement.

He's also aware, dimly, that he might not have much of a choice. Apologetically he pulls his hand out of Toshiya's, and the younger man smiles sadly.

'I have no idea,' Toshiya admits in a small voice, 'How I'm supposed to get you to fall in love with me. I know it happens, but I don't know how.'

'I'm not even sure if I'm – if I go that way, honestly.'

'“That way?”'

'If I'm gay or not,' Kaoru says awkwardly, but when Toshiya makes a little gesture towards him, he opens his arms and allows the other man into them. Toshiya smiles against his skin, placing a soft kiss against his neck.

'You're gay,' he whispers, 'I promise.'

'But I've slept with girls, and...I've never – you know – with a guy.'

'Have you ever wanted to?'

Kaoru bites his lip, feels Toshiya's soft hair against his cheek.

'Sometimes,' he says quietly. He traces a hand carefully up the line of Toshiya's spine, reaching up until his fingertips brush against the back of his neck. The skin there is soft and slowly Kaoru pushes his hand further upwards, tangling his fingers in the warm weight of Toshiya's hair. He feels it more than hears it as Toshiya's breath does a little hitch in his throat, and he pretends not to notice when the younger man's hands slip just an inch or so beneath the hem of his borrowed sweater, tracing over the bare skin there lightly.

It's just a small movement to bring their lips together, their cheeks brushing before their lips do, just softly. Kaoru feels nervous, his body tensing a little, but his hands tighten a little on Toshiya's waist and the back of his neck, not really pulling him closer but keeping him in place. Unable to keep it in, Toshiya sighs softly: Kaoru's lips are so familiar; their delicate shape, their softness, even their taste, underneath the slight tang of beer. He feels the older man's breathing as it starts to stagger itself unevenly, coming out higher and quicker; their bodies press closer together and Kaoru's tongue presses just briefly at Toshiya's lower lip, making him groan.

And it's _weird_ to kiss him this young; to have it be so similar but so different all at once – Kaoru nervous again, tentative again; uncertain again. Kaoru's teeth nibble slightly where his tongue has just been and Toshiya feels a whimper escape his lips; he clutches harder at Kaoru's skin, sliding one hand up over his chest, and with a noise that seems to come from the deepest part of Kaoru's throat the older man squeezes him tight, pushing him back against the wall, where something cold digs into his back.

He squirms, turning, and they see it together: the brass doorknob protruding from the otherwise normal wall of Toshiya's apartment.

 

He licks his lips, panting slightly; tastes Kaoru on them. He runs a finger lightly over the doorknob, fascinated; his other hand takes Kaoru's and squeezes his fingers, hard. For a moment his chest feels tight because it's too soon for Kaoru to go; it's not fair. He wants so much of him – wants _all_ of him, even when he can't have it. Wants to take him over to the bed and push him down and fuck him, or be fucked by him; wants to kiss him and go down on him and end up in his arms when it's all over. Wants to be held, the way that only Kaoru has ever held him. Wants to feel safe like that again.

Stupidly, tears prickle in his eyes, and he looks sharply away. He feels a gentle hand on his cheek.

'Just because it's here,' Kaoru says unsteadily, 'It doesn't mean I have to go.'

Toshiya looks blindly up at him; sees where his lips are red from their kisses. He reaches out to touch them and hesitantly Kaoru pulls their bodies back together again.

'I want to stay,' he says nervously, 'If you want me to. I...' he struggles, trying to figure out what he's trying to say without sounding presumptuous, 'I don't think I'm ready for...much more than this. Not yet. But I want to stay with you. I – I want to lie down with you. I...'

Toshiya interrupts him with a kiss, more intense than what they've shared so far; Kaoru falters against him weakly.

This time, when Toshiya takes his hand and leads him towards the bed, he follows.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _D.A.R.L.I.N.G_ is by my personal favourite dream pop band, Beach House. They make great music to work to (for me), so check them out if you're a writer, or if you just have ~a lot of feelings~.  
> Lyrically, I find it one of the standout songs for this fic:  
>  _Where did you come from?_  
>  _You're no stranger_  
>  _How will I know you will return_  
>  _So I won't be sad_


	15. Skeletons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A brief warning that this chapter merits a strong warning for **non consensual activity involving a child.**  
>  This story is non-linear, so if you don't want to read it, you won't miss out on any important plot progression. Please proceed with caution if this is likely to upset you - it upset me writing it.

It's right there in front of him, and it looks like the door of his closet, but instead of the little wooden handle it's got the brass doorknob.

Kaoru turns blindly into the whiteness, not wanting to. The white is spread out all around him in every direction and the door is the only object maybe for miles and miles; for at least as far as he can see. He wonders how far people can see. Twenty miles? Thirty? Forty?

Forty is the highest number he knows; everything gets a bit vague and muddled after that.

He turns back to the door, his small face creased with uncertainty. He doesn't want to go, but all the time he's standing still the door feels like it's pulling him; it feels like the end of bath time, when the plug comes out and the drain sort of sucks all the water down. It feels like it's getting stronger, and Kaoru hunches down on the floor and puts his head low so it has less of him to get at.

He wonders what would happen if he didn't go through the door. Would he wake up, or would he be stuck in the white place forever? Is he still asleep in his bed right now, or not?

Struck by a sudden curiosity he starts to edge his way around the door, trying to avoid its strange pull and get to the other side of it. He navigates it in a wide circle, but when he gets to the other side he finds it's just the same. It's not like the inside of his closet door, which has a mirror on it and some stickers. It's got two fronts – unless he didn't really go around it. Everything is so white and featureless that it's hard to tell, and he starts to doubt himself.

It feels like the only way to be sure is to stand right by the side of the door and touch both sides at once. Then he can stick his head around and see if they're both the same or not. Carefully he inches closer, feeling the horrible drag of the thing stronger than ever, and when he gets right up near it he reaches around.

His finger just brushes the doorknob and there's a click as, without him really turning it at all, the door unlatches.

Kaoru sucks in a deep breath. The pull is much stronger now, coming right from his middle, and he grips the door frame hard. He can feel his heart beating very hard in his chest, making him feel sick. Very cautiously he pokes his head around and looks.

The door's open just a crack, and inside it's...weird. Small. Squinting his eyes, he edges slightly closer, trying to make it out; it's dark and there's something all moving in there, but tiny, sort of like a mass of insects all crawling over each other. He swallows hard and realises that he can smell it, and the smell is smoke and sweat and something sort of bitter and foggy, savoury. He inches just a little closer and he can hear it, too; like distant music, something being played too far away to make out, and Kaoru reaches—

 

It's _loud_.

Kaoru clamps his hands down over his ears hard and whimpers, a five year old body with skinny limbs in a mess of adults, legs all around him like a thick forest. They're bumping him, jostling him; the music is too loud to take and they're all dancing to it, spilling their drinks. The dancing they're doing is violent, and Kaoru feels confused and scared; he ducks down on the floor and starts to crawl, wincing when a cold drink gets sloshed down the back of his neck. Somebody stomps down hard on his hand and there's a cracking sound that makes him cry out, but it's inaudible over the din of the music. The floor is sticky and dirty, and he realises it's getting his pyjamas dirty too; how will he explain that?

Maybe they'll have to believe him, if they see how he got all grubby and knocked around. His hand is starting to get all puffy and it's not moving properly. It hurts a lot when he tries, so carefully he uses his good hand to push himself to his feet. Immediately somebody knocks into him and sends him flying; he's saved from falling completely over by the body of another person, who turns to see what's hit them. Kaoru tries to back away, but a big hand reaches out and grabs his shoulder, and suddenly he's being steered through the crowd. The adult who's taken hold of him is letting him use his body like a sort of shield or bolster so he doesn't get knocked around so much, and it's a relief. Gradually, the two of them make their way out of the crowd, and Kaoru would breathe a sigh of relief but it's still too noisy and his hand is really, really hurting now, sending shooting pains through him that make him feel like he's going to throw up everywhere. Nauseated, he swallows hard, feeling his mouth flooding with thin saliva.

He gets a chance to look around and sees that the music is coming from the front of the room, where there's a stage set up; there are three people playing instruments and one singing, and two of them even have guitars! Although one of the guitars looks funny to Kaoru when he squints; a bit too big and not enough strings; there are supposed to be six, he feels pretty sure about that. Six is one of his favourite numbers, because it's the age he'll be next year. The room's not as big as he thought it was; he might have been going around in circles when he was in the crowd. He feels sort of stupid about that.

That's all he really gets to see, because the hand on his shoulder is urging him onwards, and he gets pushed firmly through some black double doors and into a draughty, dim sort of corridor, where the walls are painted cinder blocks and the lights in the ceiling are blinking a bit. The music isn't as loud out here at all; it's distant and kind of echoey. Kaoru stumbles, trying to look around himself too quickly, and the hand on his shoulder grips him roughly as they approach another door. He wonders if he's in trouble.

He peers upwards and see that the hand holding onto him is big with a few black hairs on the knuckles, and it belongs to a person who is equally big and has that smoky smell inside their clothes, making Kaoru's nose wrinkle up.

 

Suddenly, he gets a feeling that's very, very bad. He wriggles, but the hand holds tight. He tries to stop walking, but the man dragging him doesn't stop and so he nearly falls. There's another door coming up and Kaoru's almost relieved to find that he can read the sign on it, because there aren't many words he can read, but this one he sees a lot: it says _toilet_ and there's the little man symbol.

But he doesn't want to go inside, and the man is sort of trying to make him, and he's struggling.

'I don't need to go,' he says, and hears the high, nervous sort of note in his voice. He pushes back against the hand, and the man has the door open, and Kaoru can smell the toilet. His stomach churns, and then the man grabs his bad hand and squeezes it sharply and Kaoru's vision goes funny, like it's all washing over with black, and he can hear his own breathing like it's coming from outside of his head.

The music is still audible, but quite faint now. He concentrates on it hard, squeezing his eyes shut. He supposes the man must have pushed him or moved him somehow, because when he opens them again it's because the man has let him go, and is busy pushing the door shut and locking it behind them.

It smells bad in here. The floor is dirty. There's a sink and a toilet and the man does something Kaoru can't understand; he puts the toilet seat down and then sort of stands over it, so far back that he's leaning on the cistern a bit. He gestures for Kaoru to come closer, and Kaoru shakes his head.

'I don't need to go,' he says again, but the man reaches out and pulls him. His thigh hits against the edge of the toilet hard and he gets that weird feeling again, like everything he can see is foggy. He feels two big hands come up under his armpits, and then he's being lifted right up in the air. The man sort of stands him on the toilet seat and then turns him around so Kaoru's back is against his chest, and he can see his own face in the mirror. It's weird how pale his face is; it's way too white, and his eyes look like dark holes with vivid blue circles underneath. The mirror is too low for him to see the man's face, though; he can only see his hands. One of them is holding onto Kaoru's belly and the other one is busy doing something between their bodies; there's a metallic sort of sound like a buckle, and then Kaoru hears a zipping noise that seems to make all his hairs stand up.

'I want to go home,' he says quietly, and the hand on his belly starts to rub there slowly. Kaoru watches, his eyes wide and round, as it goes under the dirty shirt of his pyjamas, against his bare skin.

He realises that he should struggle or fight or something, but he can't move. All of his bones and muscles seem to have locked together and he's frozen, hypnotised by the sight of his own terrified brown eyes in the mirror. He's like the neighbour's cat that stands stiff when it sees other cats and just stares and stares; he's like a woodlouse rolling itself into a ball; he's like the foxes that get dazzled by the headlights of his mother's car and gaze straight at them, not moving, just sort of waiting to die like they're trapped there.

He makes some small noise in the back of his throat but it's not words; it's just a sound. The man's other hand is moving rhythmically behind him and he can feel it knocking gently against his lower back. He watches his pyjama shirt get shoved up under his armpits, revealing his skinny chest. He can see the way his fast breathing is making his chest go up and down, and he can see the frightened rabbit skip of his heart under his skin. The hand behind his back is moving faster, and the hand that's on him goes to the waist of his pyjama pants, dips underneath them and goes between his legs and squeezes.

Something weird happens then, which is that Kaoru stops being inside his body. He starts to inhabit the air and the faint music floating within it, the yellow of the light, the smell of damp.

Then the wall opens up like a mouth.

 

The man behind Kaoru freezes, his hands going completely still, and they both stare at the wall. Through the hole it's dark but there's some kind of busyness to it, like looking through a kaleidoscope, and Kaoru's eyes are so wide that he thinks he can see the tiny movements of it, something like gears or cogs turning; something like loads of little particles or atoms rushing together and creating something, inventing a man, who steps through the wall as it closes behind him.

He's not surprised in the way that they are, and Kaoru recognises him as the man from the graveyard; the one who gave him the cool jacket to wear. The graveyard man isn't looking at him though; he's looking at the man behind Kaoru, and the expression on his face is hard to read because it's mostly anger but there's something else, too, like one of those words that means _sadness_ but more so, like sorrow or misery.

Kaoru catches sight of himself in the mirror and he realises that his whole body is shaking. There's a funny clicking noise in his head and it's his teeth banging together. There's a warm wetness down his pyjama legs and on the lid of the toilet, and he sees with a kind of dreamy shame that as he's been standing there he's wet himself without noticing it.

The graveyard man steps forward and touches Kaoru's shoulders; strokes his hair. He looks him seriously in the face and then gently he pulls the shirt of his pyjamas back into place and picks him up, holding him so Kaoru's face is huddled against his shoulder and his legs are either side of the man's waist, even though he's all wet. He can't stop shivering, and he bites at his tongue because it takes his mind off the huge desire to vomit that's blowing up inside him like a balloon. When he looks over the graveyard man's shoulder he can see the mirror, and the reflection is mostly the graveyard man's back and his own dangling legs but he can also see the man standing over the toilet, just bits of him, and Kaoru can see that he's standing like he's been electrocuted and that his pants are open and that his private parts are all out and swollen grotesquely. He hides his face in the graveyard man's shoulder again.

'Leave,' the graveyard man says, and his voice sounds calm but his whole body is shaking just like Kaoru's is. Kaoru doesn't look, but he hears the sound of stumbling footsteps over the damp floor, and then the lock going back and the sound of the door as it slams open then swings closed again.

 

The graveyard man breathes out a long sigh that ruffles Kaoru's hair. They wait in silence for a while; Kaoru can't tell how long. His thoughts feel all funny, slow and vague and milky in colour; they drift through him and he can't grab at them.

Finally the graveyard man says, 'Let's go.' Kaoru doesn't answer. The man starts walking, opening the door with a kick, and Kaoru blinks when they're back out in the cinder block corridor. The graveyard man keeps walking, going a different way, and there's another door and then they're outside, in the soot-smelling, rainy city night. It's cold, but Kaoru can't really feel it very clearly. None of him seems to be working too well. Even his hurt hand doesn't seem to be aching any more; it just hangs at the end of his arm like a stupid dead glove.

Out on the streets, the graveyard man seems to know where they're going. He carries Kaoru down a little alleyway where it's quiet and lit up by a street lamp and then finally sets him down. Kaoru notices, in the routine kind of way that you notice the colour of somebody's eyes, that the brass doorknob is jutting out of the wall on one side. He doesn't make any attempt to go for it, however.

The graveyard man takes off his cool jacket and puts it around Kaoru's shoulders again. His hands are shaking badly; he can pull it closed but he can't manage to fasten it. His breath is coming out of him weirdly, all staggered and halting and sharp, and Kaoru sees that his eyes are red.

'I'm really sorry, kid,' he says in a low, broken-up kind of voice. Kaoru doesn't answer. Instead he does a stupid baby thing that he's not supposed to do any more; he puts the thumb of his good hand into his mouth and starts to suck on it. The graveyard man kneels down in front of him, puts his hands on Kaoru's shoulders and says very clearly, 'That wasn't your fault.'

Kaoru looks straight ahead, at his neck.

'That man was wrong,' the graveyard man says, 'He was bad.' He touches just above Kaoru's wrist on the arm that's still dangling by his side. 'You've broken a few bones,' he says. 'It'll hurt, but there's nothing to be scared of. Your mum will take you to the hospital, and they can make it better.'

His thumb jammed securely in his mouth, Kaoru gives his head a slow shake. The graveyard man falters.

'Kaoru,' he says, his voice hoarse but gentle, 'Kaoru, it's okay. It's over now. You can go back and wake up your mum and—'

'Won't believe me,' Kaoru mumbles around his thumb. The graveyard man hesitates.

'No,' he says gently, 'She won't.'

Kaoru feels himself start to cry. His shoulders go all bent in and something feels like a big hand has grabbed his lungs and is squeezing them so hard he can't breathe properly.

'Don't want to travel,' he says.

'Kaoru—'

'No.'

'Kaoru, it's okay.'

' _No,_ ' he says, trying to make his voice firmer. There's snot running down over his upper lip; disgusting. His wet pyjamas feel cold and clammy now, clinging damply to his legs.

'Don't want to travel,' Kaoru says again, and the graveyard man carefully wipes his face.

'I know,' he says softly, 'I know. It's okay.'

'I do it in my sleep.'

The man hesitates. 'Yeah. It'll happen less as you get older. You grow out of it, mostly.'

'It'll still happen.'

Pause. 'Yeah.'

There's a long silence, and the graveyard man sighs. 'Kaoru, I know you're really scared right now. I know you're wishing that you could find some way to stop travelling completely, but you can't. It's just the way you are.'

'Don't want to.'

'I know.' His voice sort of cracks a bit. 'I know, but it'll get better, I promise. There'll come a time when you'll feel like you can't wait to travel, and you'll be looking out for the door all over the place, I _promise_.' He swipes his hand quickly under his own eyes. 'Kaoru, I know you have questions. Sometimes there are so many questions, you feel like you can't fit them all into your head. Right now you're not thinking about them; right now it feels like you can't think about anything much. But they'll come back.' He pulls in a breath. 'In a few weeks, you're going to see me again, and I can answer some of the questions for you. It's all going to be all right.'

Kaoru bites down on his thumb.

'Home,' he mumbles, and the graveyard man nods.

'The doorknob is right there,' he says gently.

Like a robot, Kaoru takes off the jacket that the graveyard man put around him. He reaches out for the doorknob with his swollen hand and turns it even though it makes a horrible sick, grinding pain go all down his arm.

He vanishes, and the wall is just a wall again.

 

Alone in the alleyway, Kaoru picks up his jacket and gets woodenly to his feet. He puts it on, feels where it's still warm from his own childhood body, and reaches out for the wall to support himself.

He cries almost silently, gasping softly for breath.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Skeletons,_ by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Lyrically it's pretty vague; it's really the mood I was going for.


	16. Total Entertainment Forever

The light's dim, and as the wall seals itself behind him Kaoru wanders closer to the window, setting his hands lightly on the sill. Outside the sun isn't up yet; the small clock sitting on Toshiya's bedside table says it's just gone four. He's sleeping peacefully, his long body twisted and tangled amongst the bed sheets and his pillow dragged into his arms. One pale foot sticks out from the covers, and it's funny, how Kaoru's palms almost prickle with the desire to touch it.

It must be sometime in 1998 or later, because this is Toshiya's new apartment – or what Kaoru thinks of as his new apartment, despite the fact that he will probably move out of it long before Kaoru is born – the one he moved into alone after four years of living with Kyo.

It was supposed to be just a six-month arrangement, the two of them living together, and not for the first time Kaoru wonders exactly when it was that Kyo fell in love. Falling asleep next to him, waking up next to him every day; working with him, creating with him, eating with him – would he have had any choice? Could it have been that the sheer fact of Toshiya's continuous presence wore him down?

Kaoru moves closer to the bed, taking off his shoes, and knows that isn't it. He knows as well as Kyo does that the man they love is far too complicated, far too endearing and daring and silly; that their love is too strong and too strange to be solved by such a simple equation: presence, plus time.

Even after all these years, far too mysterious. Closer to Kaoru than his own skin, but always able to surprise him.

Trying to be quiet, Kaoru strips to his underwear and climbs under the covers next to his lover, slipping a careful arm around his waist. Toshiya's skin is smooth and warm from sleep and he's cut his hair; it's shorter than Kaoru has ever seen it on him, ruffled wildly around his pretty face. Lightly, Kaoru runs his fingers through it, smoothing it behind his ear. In his sleep, Toshiya shifts softly and mumbles something incoherent.

 

Sighing, Kaoru squeezes their bodies tight together and nestles his chin into the hollow between Toshiya's neck and his shoulder. His hand finds Toshiya's flat belly and strokes it in slow circles, enjoying the feeling of the skin. He presses a kiss to the little patch of skin behind his ear.

This apartment is about as small as the last one; it's just a studio, and it's in a bad part of town. The bed is big enough for two, though, and Toshiya says he enjoys the privacy even if Kaoru wonders if living alone is really what's best for him. Left to his own devices, Toshiya tends to get lonely; he's the type who likes to be filled up to the brim by people.

It's brighter than the last place, though; there are more windows, and the little strip of kitchen is more modern, and there's a laundry room in the basement of the building so he doesn't have to haul his dirty clothes to the launderette any more. The minutiae of his life is familiar to Kaoru's as his own, and he hugs onto him harder, feeling Toshiya start to stir in his arms.

'Don't wake up,' Kaoru whispers, but uselessly. Toshiya makes a soft noise, something like a groan, and his eyelids flutter open; disoriented by the darkness, he rubs at his face, and then his long finger move to tangle sleepily with the hand resting against his skin.

'Hi,' he whispers, and Kaoru can hear the smile in his voice.

'Hi.'

'Have you been here long?'

'Only a few minutes. It's early; go back to sleep.'

Toshiya yawns widely. 'No way.'

He pulls himself up into a sitting position, blinking as he struggles to focus without his glasses. He stretches, his shirt riding up, and Kaoru can't keep his hand from following the exposed skin, fingers running up the long line of his back.

Smiling, Toshiya turns in his hold. He's still smiling as they kiss, and Kaoru thinks that it's written into his memory; the way Toshiya kisses; encoded into his very muscles and nerves, the way his lover feels against him.

'How old are you?' Kaoru asks against his lips, and Toshiya strokes his cheek gently.

'I'm thirty-three. You?'

'Thirty-seven.'

Toshiya pulls back slightly, studying him in the dim light, his dark eyes unusually hard to read. His thumb traces a slow line against Kaoru's jaw as he thinks.

'Will you go somewhere with me?' he asks at last, and of course Kaoru nods, because they both know that there's nowhere he wouldn't go with Toshiya by his side.

 

The sky is still dark when they leave the building, and Kaoru shivers a little in the chill of the night. A cold wind ruffles their hair as they start walking, but they don't go far; Toshiya leads him through Tennōji park to the Horikoshi Shrine, deserted and slightly eerie at this early hour. Quietly, they wash their hands and faces and bow their way through the gate, and Toshiya slips his hand into Kaoru's as they climb the steps. At the top they circle the shrine itself quickly, and Kaoru feels a hint of unease in the pit of his stomach as Toshiya hesitates and looks around, an uncertain expression on his face. It's like he's looking for something, or struggling to remember something he can't quite grasp; his face is almost distressed, and Kaoru squeezes his hand.

'Toshiya?'

Toshiya smiles at him and gives a shy pull to his hand, leading him over to the little stone steps that lead up to the altar itself. There, they sit down with their backs to the benevolent god, and Toshiya tugs Kaoru's hand into his lap, turning it palm upward as if he's examining it before simply wrapping both of his hands around it again. He sits hunched against the wind, his face a little pale from the lack of sleep, and he glances briefly at Kaoru's face before turning his dark eyes back to the view in front of them.

'I'm sick,' he says.

The way he says it tells Kaoru that he means something more than a cold, and Kaoru stills.

He has the dim impression of feeling the way a stone must feel, hard and smooth, the wind whistling over it. He wonders if inside every rock there's a secret pulse, beating frantically the way his is now, making his throat dry and his eyes water.

Toshiya studies their entwined hands as if he's never seen anything like them.

'You can probably cure it in your time,' he says, his voice strained like he's trying for a joke, 'But not so much in mine.'

Effortfully, he looks up at Kaoru. 'Did you already know?' he asks painfully, and Kaoru hesitates before giving a tentative nod.

Toshiya's hands slip out of his and the two men curl into each other instead, forming one body against the wind. Toshiya is shivering uncontrollably, his teeth banging together, and Kaoru wraps an arm around him fiercely. He holds him tight even though it will do nothing to help.

'How long have you known for?' Toshiya asks at last, the words sounding uncomfortable in his throat.

'A long time,' Kaoru says heavily. 'I've seen you at – lots of ages.'

'Have you seen me when I have it...properly? Really badly, I mean?'

Kaoru nods, and Toshiya starts biting at his thumbnail.

'Hope I don't look too awful,' he says jaggedly, and Kaoru shoots him a sharp look that softens almost instantly.

'You have been beautiful for every single day of your life,' he says simply, and Toshiya gives him a lop-sided smile, knocking their knees together.

'I suppose you know how it – ends?' he asks, his voice deliberately light, and Kaoru nods slowly.

'It's not that want to keep things from you,' he says softly. 'I just don't think it would be good for you, to know. To be counting days.'

'But I wouldn't—'

'You would,' Kaoru interrupts gently. 'You wouldn't be able to help it. Nobody would.'

Toshiya sighs. With weak hands he lights up a cigarette, and Kaoru thinks that the sun will be coming up soon. They sit quietly as Toshiya smokes, and Kaoru strokes his back, and the sky grows lighter. The air has a blue-grey quality that's fading into white; it smells ashy, flinty, almost metallic.

'Will you tell me something else?' Toshiya asks at last, and Kaoru squeezes his knee.

'What do you want to know?' he asks, and Toshiya smiles at him with reddened eyes.

'If I'm not going to see it,' he says, 'I'd kind of like to know what the future's like.'

 

He waits then, not sure how the older man is going to react. The light is getting steadily stronger, the sound of traffic growing louder; he presses his cold hands between his knees.

'It's hard to know where to start,' Kaoru says finally, and Toshiya sniffs and wipes his face.

'You don't have to tell me,' he says, and there's a short silence.

'Are you sure you want to know?' Kaoru asks carefully.

'Yeah. I am.'

There's another short wait whilst Kaoru lights up a cigarette of his own, and he watches its tiny flakes of ash blow away on the breeze as he chooses his words.

'When I was a young adult,' he says, 'I worked in a rift bar. I disappeared so much; I got fired so often...they had a sort of seedy reputation, back then. It was the only kind of work I could easily get, because nobody wanted to do it. Rift bars were...kind of like internet cafes, I suppose, but for virtual reality games. Or – at least, they started out as games.' He pauses. 'Virtual reality is...big. It got treated like a fad when the rift bars first started to show up, but now they're everywhere, and they're full. People have virtual houses; virtual jobs. Virtual currency is strong.'

He smiles, but it's a bitter sort of smile that doesn't really suit him. 'It's occurred to me a few times,' he says, 'That I could put you inside the rift. Recreate your image; download packs that imitate your personality. There's a world where I could be with you all the time; forever. But it wouldn't be the same.'

He sighs, his cigarette smoke blue-coloured in the early morning light. It's too cloudy to see if the sun is up yet or not.

'A lot of people have done it,' he says quietly, 'Created their perfect lovers, inside the rift. In the real world, there's not much love around any more. Too messy; too time-consuming. Too difficult. People like you don't really exist any more.'

'Like me?' Toshiya asks, his eyes wide, and Kaoru shrugs.

'You love so much,' he says simply. 'You would confuse people. Nobody wants love any more. Just entertainment. Pleasure. That's the only point that's left, in the future.'

'It sounds like a dystopia,' Toshiya says numbly, and Kaoru shrugs.

'People are happy. They say they're happy.'

' _That's_ really what's waiting for us?'

'That's it.'

'Fuck.' Toshiya stares out over the city, but he's not really seeing it. 'If that's the case, maybe I'm glad I'm checking out early.'

He means it as a joke, but neither of them laugh. Instead, Kaoru takes his hand and squeezes it.

'I suppose,' Toshiya tries, his tone of voice horribly brave sounding, 'We would never have met, in a future like that. Or we wouldn't have had this.'

'If you were born in the future?' Kaoru sighs. 'Maybe not.'

There's a long, long silence, during which they listen to the sounds of the birds and the traffic. It's grown heavy enough to have solidified into one continuous rushing sound, and the sky is almost entirely white.

'I guess,' Toshiya says finally, 'this was never meant to happen. In an ordinary life it would never have happened.'

'Toshiya, it—'

'But we always knew, didn't we?' Toshiya says, and Kaoru sees a tear fall from his cheek into his lap, 'We always knew were just – borrowing it. _Stealing_ it, from the lives we thought we should have had.'

'Toshiya—'

'It's eleven years,' Toshiya interrupts him, 'Until you're born. Think I'll make it until then? I guess you already know either way. I don't, do I? We never live at the same time, do we? There's not a single second of my life that I share with yours.' His words end up distorted, and he scrubs the tears from his cheeks harshly.

'This counts, Toshiya,' Kaoru says quietly. 'It counts for a lot. More than you think.'

Carefully he places his hands on either side of Toshiya's face, using his thumbs to gently but firmly swipe away the tears below his eyes. 'I was born this way,' he says matter-of-factly, shrugging, 'And it's mostly fucked up my life. It wrecked my parents' marriage; meant that I never saw my dad again; put me in danger when I was a kid. But, there's also been you.' He pauses for breath, and then leans forward and knocks their foreheads together gently. 'Sometimes, Toshiya, you've been the only thing that's kept me going. And I can't believe that this wasn't meant to be, because I can't stop myself from coming back to you. It's like you're the centre of it all for me; it's like gravity. I couldn't stay away from you if I tried, Toshiya, I – I'm meant to be here. I know it.'

With their foreheads pressed together, Kaoru can feel how uneven Toshiya's breaths are, and with soft fingers he wipes hair and tears away from Toshiya's face. The air between them is warm and wet; it takes a solid form in Toshiya's lips, brushing tentatively against Kaoru's own.

That kiss he could recognise anywhere; those lips he would know in the dark. He holds him close.

 

In time they leave, taking a slow walk back to Toshiya's apartment, where they close the door behind them. The clock by Toshiya's bedside reads sometime after six, and after they've taken their shoes off Kaoru pulls Toshiya's cold hands under his T-shirt and against his skin, warming them up. Smiling, Toshiya slides his hands up, pulling the T-shirt up with them until it's up over Kaoru's head and he's dropping it to the floor. Slowly, almost worshipfully, he turns his attentions to Kaoru's arms, tracing the swirls of ink there.

'I always expect it to feel different,' he laughs, 'Raised or something. But it's just skin.'

'It's not as if you don't know anybody else with tattoos. Isn't Kyo pretty covered with them by now?'

'Well, I've never had the urge to touch his,' Toshiya says, his index finger trailing the point of Kaoru's elbow. Gently, he leans forward and just lightly licks the bat on Kaoru's neck. He feels the older man's hands come up around his waist, holding him steady.

'We don't have to do anything,' he mumbles, and Toshiya smiles against his skin.

'If I don't have much time left, I'd kind of like to make the most of it.'

'You have time,' Kaoru says, but he kisses him, feeling Toshiya's hands flatten against his chest before sliding up over his shoulders, one cupping the back of his neck whilst the other buries itself in his hair; it pulls lightly and Kaoru bites at Toshiya's lower lip.

Laughing softly, Toshiya steps back and pulls off his own T-shirt, throwing it carelessly to the floor. As Kaoru watches, he unbuttons his jeans and pulls his underwear down with them, deftly freeing his long legs.

'Nice socks,' Kaoru says, and Toshiya grins at him wickedly as he gets rid of them.

'Thanks.'

He takes a few more slow steps backwards, settling himself on the edge of the bed, and Kaoru swallows hard as he looks at him.

It feels impossible, that such a beautiful body can be so ill. He runs his eyes up the smooth, soft skin, the shape of the muscle and bone; takes it all in before it turns to ash. He hardly realises that he's walking forwards, stumbling like a sleepwalker; he gets down on his knees and, his eyes flicking briefly up to Toshiya's face, lifts his left foot until it's high enough to rest on his shoulder. He turns his face to gently kiss the ankle, and he smiles at Toshiya's expression: intense, focussed, biting his lower lip excitedly.

He knows the body in front of him so well, but he goes slowly, kissing his way up Toshiya's leg until the younger man has his knee hooked around Kaoru's back, his other leg unconsciously spreading wider. He's hard but Kaoru ignores it, placing soft kisses on the inside of his thigh, his hand stroking the trembling muscles there soothingly.

'Kaoru,' Toshiya whispers a little unsteadily, 'I really want you. I—'

Kaoru presses a light kiss to the tip of his cock, and his words get mixed up in a quiet whining noise.

He tastes just the same; just as good as he ever did, and Kaoru licks him slowly, right up the length of him. He feels the skin on his arms prickling like he's cold; feels the hairs on the back of his neck stiffening; he rubs his lips softly over the head of Toshiya's dick, almost nuzzling him. There's a long, soft gasping sound, just a little broken up, and Toshiya's long-fingered hand tangles itself in Kaoru's hair.

'Remember the first time?' he whispers, and Kaoru smiles against him.

'Which one?'

On the bed, Toshiya shivers. 'Yours.'

Kaoru's lips feel soft as they close over the head of Toshiya's cock and slide down the length of him, surrounding him in wet heat, and he arches up from the bed.

'You were so nervous,' Toshiya gasps, his leg tightening around Kaoru's shoulder, 'You were so scared you were going to do it wrong and...' his voice drifts away as his head falls back, his lips working soundlessly, and when he finishes his sentence it's breathless: 'and hurt me. God, _Kaoru_.'

He hisses faintly as the contact between them is lost, and then shivers as Kaoru speaks and he feels his hot breath against his wet skin: 'I need...'

Wordlessly, Toshiya leans back and jerks open the drawer in his bedside table. He snatches haphazardly at what they need and then presses the lube into Kaoru's hand, feeling mesmerised by the sight of the face he loves so well so close to his cock. He remains staring at it, propped up on his elbows, as Kaoru drizzles clear lubricant over his fingers and then, his eyes meeting Toshiya's, slips his hand carefully between his legs.

Toshiya's breath gets tight and, as Kaoru's fingers rub at him gently, he thinks about how much it feels like the first time. Kaoru's other hand is grasping at his hip, stroking it soothingly as he pushes a finger inside of Toshiya's body; his mouth kisses and licks at the head of his dick, as if to distract him.

He'd been so excited that first time, he'd felt like he was about to come apart at the seams. Kaoru slips another finger inside his body and Toshiya sighs, his eyes slipping closed, because nothing has changed. This, Kaoru touching him like this, always makes him feel like he could fly into pieces. The older man shifts his hand, and the feeling is like dissolving; not quite enough, not yet, but enough to make him dizzy with promise.

He'd known, the first time, that he was lost forever. It had felt ceremonial, almost, like a rite: as if all the kind words and soft touches Kaoru had ever given him had reached their natural conclusion; as if they were being bonded, tied together in some vital way that still, even now, has the power to make him shake.

He bites his lip to stifle a moan as Kaoru's fingers gently explore him, and he sees the older man has his eyes closed, his lips pressing hotly against the underside of Toshiya's cock. He smiles at him even though he can't see it, gasps when those small fingers slip deeper, and tightens the leg slung over Kaoru's back.

'No more,' he says softly, 'I'm ready.'

'You're sure?'

Toshiya's only answer is to shift impatiently against him and Kaoru grins as he gets on his knees on the bed, taking Toshiya by the hips and pulling him firmly into position. Toshiya's hand reaches out, coats Kaoru's cock haphazardly with lube. It's awkward – with his ass tugged up on Kaoru's thighs and his legs either side of his hips, he has to bend himself almost double to reach – but his face is intent, almost adorably focussed, and Kaoru feels the familiar feeling in his chest: the tightness he seems to get there whenever he looks at his lover, as though it's suddenly hard to breathe.

He closes his eyes as he pushes inside him, hears Toshiya's low groan; knows that he will have to leave him again before too long.

But now it's out in the open between them: the fact that Toshiya will leave him first, after all. That there will come a time where he'll never come back.

Kaoru clutches him tight, like he won't let go.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Total Entertainment Forever_ , by Father John Misty, was kind of an obvious choice for this chapter, considering the future that Kaoru lives in. For a completely unrelated fact, I'm accidentally seeing him live in May, as he's playing at the same festival as Bjork, who is basically a religious icon for me.


	17. 20th Century Boy

His posture on the bed is unbalanced, spiky and unreliable. He sits in the way he always has, leaning back on his hands and his knees defiantly spread, but there's a lack of confidence in the way that his eyes keep slipping away from Toshiya's and focussing themselves on the wall behind him or the floor under his feet; in the tense muscle that's flickering faintly in his jaw. When he lights a cigarette, he has to chase the tip of it around with the lighter flame for a moment because his hands are shaking, and Toshiya feels it like a bruise in the chest: _I did that_.

_He's so nervous because of me._

The worst thought of all: _because I pushed him away_.

'Are you insane,' Kyo says at last. To his own ears he sounds calm, but he's aware of a faint ringing in the back of his head, like an alarm bell going off, and his own thoughts seem to be shorting out on him unsteadily.

He's aware that he's sitting there for one reason, and one reason only: a kind of masochistic impulse to see how much discomfort he can take, gaining a sort of bizarre, heady pleasure in sitting still with his outer layers flayed and his soul laid bare. It's like an adrenaline rush; it's costing him a lot of energy to remain still.

His whole body feels like it's itching all along his nerves.

In front of him, Toshiya is absently squeezing his lower lip together between his thumb and his forefinger, pleating the tender flesh: a nervous habit of his. He gives Kyo an anxious sort of smile.

When he does that he reminds Kyo of a dog, the way they grin and lick their lips and fold back their ears to show that they're not a threat.

'I don't think so,' Toshiya tries, his voice unconvincingly light. In front of him, Kyo's face looks tight; when he speaks his voice sounds tight, too, as if his throat is closing up on him.

'If this is something you concocted to make things less awkward,' he says stiffly, 'then I'm not sure how impressed I am.'

Toshiya sort of flinches a little, like that's hurt him.

'It's real,' he says, his voice almost apologetic. 'He's a time traveller, and I – I really wanted to tell you before, but I knew I wasn't supposed to, and I didn't think you'd believe me.'

Kyo gives him a frank sort of look and Toshiya sighs, laughing in a way that sounds sad.

'You don't believe me now,' he says.

 

It's a weird sort of night, Kyo thinks. In some strange way it feels almost foreordained, as if it had been planned long ago; looking back, it seems entirely possible that he might have met Toshiya and then lived through the past few years with him entirely for the sake of this moment: the two of them at stalemate, sitting opposite each other on their beds, not speaking.

Toshiya's hurt, but in a way that feels impossible to diagnose, and so for the moment Kyo forces himself to shut it out. He focusses on his cigarette, the smell and taste of it, the smoothness of the paper between his fingers.

'The travelling – that's how I met him,' Toshiya says suddenly, 'When I was six. He wasn't a kid like me; he was an adult, like he is now. He was twenty-eight years old and it was – it was like he recognised me. He knew my name.' He smiles shakily but his eyes, when he looks at Kyo, are quite steady. 'He's always been there,' he says simply. 'After I saw him that first time, he showed up more and more. Sometimes a few months would go by without me seeing him, and then sometimes I'd see him every day...I mean every day, for _me_. He'd be younger, or older...it confused me. Telling him things again that I'd told him just the day before, because he was younger again and didn't have the memories yet...'

Kyo seems to be concentrating very hard on his cigarette, almost glaring at it.

'I grew up with him,' Toshiya says quietly. 'I felt...I didn't understand how I felt, at first. I was a kid still.' He sighs, running an agitated hand through his hair, 'There wasn't a lot of love in my family, but _Kaoru_ loved me, and I needed it so much. Nobody else treated me like that; like I was something really special.' He pauses. 'He was so gentle with me, when I was young. All he did was look after me, but when he was around I felt safe. I felt surrounded by love, completely, like I could finally have my fill of it; like there wasn't ever going to be an end.'

Kyo's face could be carved from stone.

'I...' Toshiya takes a deep breath, but loses it almost instantly. 'I don't want to hurt you,' he mumbles. Kyo's face doesn't change.

'Go on,' he says woodenly, and Toshiya digs his fingernails nervously into the skin of his own wrist.

'When I started getting older,' he says in a rush, 'Things changed. Kaoru – he wasn't as comfortable with me. I was turning into the man he knew, and he knew our relationship would change; he just didn't know when. He thought—' he breaks off suddenly, turning his face to the side, and swallows.

There's a small silence.

'I think he thought he'd be betraying me,' Toshiya says finally, speaking slower. 'And I think...I think he might have tried to change it. I think he had this idea that he could control things; that he could maybe stay being my friend, and keep me from falling in love with him.'

Kyo blinks up at him, the look in his eyes inscrutable. 'Why,' he says, not bothering to add a question mark.

'I guess he knew he'd always be disappearing. The travelling – he can't control it, not really. Sometimes it happens when he's asleep, but most often it's because he sees a door.'

'A door,' Kyo repeats. It's impossible to tell from his voice what he's thinking.

'Yeah. It's – well, I guess it's more about – there's a certain kind of doorknob, a round one made of brass; it appears for him. Sometimes he sees it coming straight out of walls, places where there aren't any doors; but it makes them into a door, you see. When he was a kid, he it happened with a tree. He went straight inside it.'

He risks a glance into Kyo's face, but it isn't encouraging.

'A round, brass doorknob,' he says lamely, 'It's – there was that exact doorknob on my closet when I was a kid. When we first met, I took him to it. Kyo, I _know_ how this sounds, but I also know what I saw.' He pauses, biting his lip. 'Kyo, he opened the door of my closet and he disappeared.'

'Disappeared,' Kyo mutters, and Toshiya's eyes leap to his face, but he seems to simply be turning the word over.

'Disappeared,' he repeats, his voice a little firmer. 'I remember – I watched him go and then I ran right over to the closet and got inside it. I guess I was looking for a secret door in it, or a Twilight Zone portal or something.' He snorts, but then smiles a little ruefully, 'I wanted to see if it would transport me, too. But it didn't, of course.'

There's a wistful tone in his voice that makes Kyo think that maybe Toshiya would have preferred it if the closet had transported him, but even following that train of thought is making his head ache. He feels stuffed full of contradictions; he shakes his head stubbornly.

'You understand that what you're telling me is crazy,' he says flatly, and Toshiya hesitates before giving a small nod.

'Yeah, I do.'

'So you understand that I can't actually _believe_ this, right?'

Nervously, Toshiya smiles at him. 'If I thought that, I never would have told you.'

Kyo stares at him blankly. 'Well, I hate to let you down.'

 

He's quiet for a moment, looking at Toshiya hard, and then he sighs. 'Let's just say,' he says a little wearily, 'That hypothetically, I believe you. So he uses doors to travel back and forth; can't he just stay in one place? If he's so attached to you, if he's always been there, shouldn't he want to stay here with you?'

'It doesn't work that way. He's tried.'

'To stay?'

Toshiya nods. 'He can only last here until he falls asleep. When he does, he dreams of the door – dreams of opening it; he can't help it. He disappears.'

'That's convenient,' Kyo mutters, and Toshiya shoots him a look that's suddenly hard.

'It's not a line,' he says sharply. 'I've seen it happen, don't you get that? I've watched him vanish; I've _seen_ it. I've...' he stops abruptly, the hardness leaving his face, 'I was the one who told him. I told him, the first time – his first time – that we met; how it would work when he fell asleep.' He laughs in a strained kind of way, gripping his own head, 'I'm not making sense.'

'No, you're not,' Kyo agrees, not unkindly.

'What I mean to say is that...the first time we met, when I was six, it was only the first time for me. He'd already met me; Kaoru already knew me, as an adult. The first time he ever met me, I was nineteen.' He bites his lip, 'Do you remember the night that I asked you to go sleep at Rie's place?'

'Vividly,' Kyo says sourly.

'That was the night. He came into that bar I used to work in, and I kissed him, and he was horrified.' He gives a snort of laughter, but it's unconvincing; his eyes are wet. 'He didn't know who I was, didn't understand how I knew who he was...it was a mess.'

'So what, he knew what he was but he couldn't have guessed that he'd met you in his own future?' Kyo says in an acid tone, and Toshiya shakes his head a little fretfully.

'He had these rules,' he says. 'It was always – it used to scare him, travelling; he never used to want to. When he did it, it was mostly by accident, and he wasn't going around talking to people; he was just trying to get back as quickly as possible.'

'But he ended up talking to _you_.'

'Because he knew that he already _had_. He couldn't change it any more.'

'But initially—'

'There is no “initially”, don't you see? He was nineteen, he had these rules, and then he ran into somebody in the past who knew him. He didn't get to break the rule for the first time because he'd already broken it, in the future, and he'd already broken it in the future because he'd already broken it in the past. There _is_ no beginning. It's...for you, time is a straight line. It starts when you're born and it stops when you die; everything that happens is plotted in order along that line. But if it wasn't like that, how do you know what's already happened and what's yet to happen? If something's happened and you just haven't experienced it yet, is it ahead of you or behind you? If you can go back before the time that you're born, where's the beginning?'

He feels so exasperated at Kyo's pigheaded refusal to understand that he actually thumps the bed with his fist, his eyes wide and bright. Slowly, giving nothing away, the other man nods.

'I suppose that makes sense,' he says, his voice suggesting that it makes no sense at all.

 

So they're back where they started: each of them sitting on their own beds, not really talking any more, Kyo smoking more than feels good and Toshiya tugging at his lower lip absently.

There's that same weird sense again, of things feeling foreordained. Kyo can't tell if it's a real feeling, or if Toshiya's ramblings have somehow sunk into him.

His lungs are heavy and thick and his breaths seem to cost him some effort. He grinds his cigarette out against the windowsill and lights another.

He remembers very clearly when Toshiya moved in; the irritation that Die had sent him another stray, and the way the annoyance had faded into nothing when the four of them had got together and Toshiya had played with them for the first time.

Perhaps with that – the ease in which Toshiya had fitted himself among them, the perfection of his sound blending with theirs, the feeling of things falling neatly into place – Kyo had used up his share of fate.

Tentatively, he allows himself to explore the thought, testing how much it hurts. Suppose that when Toshiya first stood in front of him that day, there had been something like a fork in the road, and one fork was the band and music and late, late nights with tired eyes and ink-stained fingers, and countless day jobs and sweating under stage lighting and feeling the ring of applause in his head.

Suppose that the other fork had been something different entirely; suppose Toshiya hadn't worked out with the band, but their paths had kept crossing anyway, or that he'd stayed on in the flat anyway.

Might then his allowance of fate had been used up some other way?

He straightens up.

'I don't know whether I believe you or not,' he says a little haltingly. 'I need to think about it. And I'm going to have more questions.'

Toshiya's smile is strained.

'That's about as good as I could have hoped for, I guess.'

'About this morning,' Kyo says abruptly, and watches Toshiya's face change.

'Kyo—'

'I'm only talking about it,' he says heavily, 'To tell you that I don't want to talk about it.'

'I...' Toshiya scrapes his thumbnail along the seam of his jeans, fighting the urge to chew on it, 'I kind of feel like we should talk about it, though.'

'No.' Kyo smiles at him stiffly. 'I think it's better if it never happened.'

'Do you want me to move out?'

'Neither of us can afford that.'

'We could...' Toshiya gives into temptation and gnaws at his thumbnail for a moment, 'I don't know, maybe we could give up this place, if it's easier; I could move in with Die and you could go live with Shinya, or—'

'I don't want to stop living with you,' Kyo says tonelessly. The skin around his eyes looks stiff and tense, the way it always does when he's stressed, but when he speaks again his voice is gentler than Toshiya expects: 'Dumbass.'

There's affection in that voice: painful and stunted, with nowhere to go, like a plant trying to grow in the dark.

Toshiya leans forward and buries his face in his hands; lets some of the awful tension inside of him break apart. He can hear his own shuddering, uneven breaths; can see the darkness of his own palms.

Seeing this through Kyo's eyes, he suddenly can't imagine how his own life became so strange.

'He wanted me to break up with him,' he says in a strange, gritty voice, forcing it past his lips, 'When I told him about you. He told me that I should try to make a go of it with you; that you're a good man.'

Kyo snorts roughly.

'He's wrong about that.'

'Kyo,' Toshiya says helplessly, 'You are good. I know you're good.'

'Do you.'

'You're my best friend, Kyo. I'm glad you don't want me to move out, because – to be honest, I don't know what I'd do without you.'

Kyo's silent for a moment.

'You'd live,' he says at last, brusquely.

But both of them know his heart isn't in it.

 

They don't talk for much longer, that night. Toshiya's clearly exhausted, his whole body sagging, and Kyo experiments with ushering him into bed, shutting up his sleepy attempts at conversation, and discovers that it doesn't feel that bad. He tests his capabilities gently, but a broken heart isn't like a broken limb or a slashed throat; he can still move and speak and do everything the same as before.

If anything, he thinks as he settles himself down in his own bed, it's not really a pain so much as a weight. It lies heavily on his chest, not really enough to cut off his breathing; just enough to make it a little ragged.

He stares stubbornly up at the ceiling. It's possibly all right to cry – he feels like the weight might slacken a little if he does – but he's not sure that he'll be able to. At the very least, he has to wait until Toshiya's breath evens out and he starts his gentle snoring.

He feels alternately hot and cold, hot and cold. Feels the inside of his chest flashing from heart to stone.

Something he hadn't even been able to force himself to say to Toshiya: _even if all of this is true, if he's gone all the time, how can you believe anything he's said?_

_If you're here in this time, then who's there in this time?_

_What if you've made him your everything, but you're not that much to him? What if you're just his twentieth century boy?_

Risking a quick glance across the room, he knows it's no good. Toshiya lacks that cynical side; he doesn't have any of Kyo's hard edges. At his heart he's still the naïve country boy he was when he first walked into Kyo's life almost three years ago, losing himself in daydreams and settling himself into a stranger's apartment like it's no big deal; getting too drunk on cheap beer and falling down laughing; stripping off his clothes in the heart of the summer and standing naked in front of their single window, happily anonymous in this huge, alien city. Forcing his way into Kyo's heart with his clumsy openness, his unselfconscious affection, the look on his face when he gets lost in the music they're making together.

Toshiya's asleep now; his breaths are slow and deep. Kyo swallows, a tight little wince of a motion, and thinks that maybe he can't cry; that maybe the inside of him is like the weather when it's too cold to snow.

When he searches for the bad, evil, vengeful feelings inside of himself he finds them all twisted together in a bunch but numbed, for now. They'll be back, he's sure. There'll be time to separate them, one by one, from each other; time enough to peer into them and turn them inside out and let them flow, eventually, through his hand and onto paper.

Shortly before he falls asleep, he wonders if this is really what's best for him. After all, this is a love that he can't fuck up; this is a love that can never flower but can also never die. A stupid, sad, evergreen love.

He allows himself a rare moment to dwell on happier times; a habit he doesn't indulge in often. It's obvious and maybe even a little creepy, but the memory most comforting to him is that single vision of Toshiya with his clothes stripped off, sweat shining on his bare skin, summer sun beating into their tiny, boxlike apartment.

Toshiya's breathing is quiet and the hum of the city is dulled. In their shared home, the loudest sound is made by the Toshiya of nearly three years ago, crossing to the window to try and tempt in a non-existent breeze.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _20th Century Boy_ , by T Rex...we finally reached this fic's namesake! (It was simply called 'Doors' for the longest time...that's still the name of the word document it's typed up in.) 
> 
> The sound of the song probably feels completely at odds with the feeling of this chapter, but that was kind of what I wanted. In my own nerdy way, I enjoyed the contrast between the way Kyo is thinking and the way things actually are; I liked that the song could turn such a suspicious, ungenerous thought into something playful and fun and sweet. 
> 
> I don't think I have a single coherent thought after 3am.


End file.
